I have been checking my witness node dashboard on Sumo Logic every day this week to see if new events or errors would occur so I could add a new widget for them. Some widget are being modified or even deleted if I find them not useful or not making much sense. For example the previous "Number of transactions per block" was interesting but overkill, I didn't really need to know the number of transaction in each single block. An average of transaction per block per one hour time slice would be enough in a graph that shows the trend.
What's new in the dashboard
The first I've added is a "Unlinkable blocks & invalid tx' widget. Unlinkable blocks happens when a witness node receive a block that cannot be linked to the existing blockchain due to some mismatch. I'm not 100% sure yet why this occurs but @gtg said this happens during micro forks.
Invalid transactions are transactions that are rejected by the local blockchain rules, most of the time (from my current logs) they are transactions that have expired. All transactions have an expiry time and needs to be put in a block, signed and linked to the blockchain before that time. If a witness miss the block, it goes to the next witness and so on if missed again. This is why a reliable witness server is important because if the transaction expired this means the action from that user would be reverted: say you make a transfer and it actually didn't happen...
I've also added a graph showing the number of transaction per hour at each hour slice in the last 24 hours. It's currently more by curiosity and maybe it will reveal something later on.
Same for the average transactions per block curve.
The double signing widget I previously added to the dashboard was also useful and helped spot an issue with @bobinson's server and alerted him early.
Realtime alerts
Sumo Logic has a real time alert functionality based on a schedule search. That would be useful as I won't have to manually monitor my dashboard. However, that feature is only available in the paid plan so I will wait a little more :-D
As @bobinson mentioned to me, it would be good if Steemit Inc could install something like Sumo Logic or Splunk and New Relic into their nodes especially the Testnet with a public dashboard so witnesses can also monitor it during their tests.
Related content
- Witness Earnings Report - 2018-10-15
- Little discovery thanks to the use of Sumo Logic on my witness server
Summary of some of my other contributions
| Project | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Steemed Phish | Chrome browser extension to make external links more visible and alert you on Phishing/Scamming links | Steemed Phish |
| Dtube Community Support | This project by @evildido allows users to run their own IPFS node and pin videos in order to cache them for longer. Dtube has the tendency of deleting non-popular video after few days only. I helped Dockerizing the project for an easier deployment on almost any platform. I've also contributed by running two nodes, one in Australia and one in Canada to cache #teamaustralia and #teamnz videos. | Dockerizing Dtube Community Support |
| DiscoSteem Bot | This is a Discord/Steem bot project by @planetenamek. When I started Steemulant Bot for the Vietnamese community, I didn't know the existence of DiscoSteem Bot and wanted something written in NodeJS. I've ended up continuing my own project as it contains code and logic for personal use and for the Vietnamese community. But I've decided to share some useful features that can benefit the users of DiscoSteem Bot and will continue to add more functionalities as I go. | Dockerizing DiscoSteem Bot |
| A Dollar A Day | This is a project run by @pennsif and will donate 15 SBD every day to a charity | "A dollar a day" fundraiser - Karaoke Singing: Le chanteur malheureux |
| Team Vietnam | I started a new Vietnamese community on Discord and developed @teamvn, a community bot to help grow the Vietnamese community and help them create higher quality content. | |
| POCKET-JS | This is my Javascript (NodeJS) port of the POCKET confirmer by @biophil. POCKET is an experimental crypto token on top of STEEM. | POCKET-JS Confirmer |
| Skippy Bot | I've written this Discord bot for @teamaustralia, it has three main features: a level bot (like Tatsumaki but with Australian animal images), a chatter bot and a footer banner generator for both @teamaustralia, @teamnz and @steemph | Witness Update 2018-07-30 - Team Australia's Skippy Bot |
Credits
- The image at the top has been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.