Bitcoin Forum

I'm interested to learn what tools or processes other node operators use to monitor the general health of your node. What do you use to check how well it's running?

Obviously there's the standard infra metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network) that can become overloaded and cause issues or failures. What about node-specific metrics are of most interest to you? Clock drift, block number, services statuses?

I put together a simple web app to help check the status of a public node: https://refaktr.io/nodewatch

The whole point of running a daemon is that I don't have to monitor all of them all the time ;) My Bitcoin Core is doing just fine for many years now.

For network, you can set an upload target (read: maximum). There's not really a reason for the rest to suddenly be overloaded, it's not as if Bitcoin is suddenly going to produce much more blocks to verify.

I only use basic monitor tool for the whole system. But if i ever want to monitor both my system and node in detail, i probably would use https://github.com/jlopp/statoshi (https://github.com/jlopp/statoshi).

In fact, the most critical element of any node is the storage medium. My node stores the blockchain on external SSD, so my main concerns are such SSD's parameters such as Wear Leveling Count and Reallocated Sectors Count, which I check periodically on  monthly basis. To be safe, I maintain two external SSDs with full copies of the blockchain, rotating my node’s connection between them each month.

May I ask why you're concerned about this? A full IBD on a system with low (8 GB) RAM writes several TB of data, which should be at most around 1% of what a modern SSD can handle. It's much less if you have more RAM, and the monthly addition should be only a fraction of a TB in writes. Wear Leveling is handled by the disk itself, so it doesn't need user attention either.

I prefer my lazy approach: in the rare event that the disks with my blocks fails, I'll just install a new disk and let it sync for a day :)