CGWatcher 1.4.0, a GUI/monitor for CGMiner & BFGMiner to help minimize downtime

[milone]

joshki: I will definitely be in touch and will be putting the source on GitHub soon. I may message you beforehand to work out any potential changes that may be needed, and would ultimately like to put the OSX source on GitHub as well.

gateway: CGRemote will provide monitoring remote miners. It will allow you to monitor miners regardless of whether or not CGWatcher is running on them.

The two applications have different purposes. You can think of CGWatcher as a babysitter for the miner. It runs on the same computer as the miner and watches for problems. If it detects problems, it attempts to resolve the problem to avoid downtime. CGRemote, on the other hand, will be more of a dashboard for all of your miners.

If CGWatcher is running on the mining computer (which is preferable and will give you far more control), CGRemote will communicate with CGWatcher (which in turn communicates with the miner.) If CGWatcher is not running on the mining computer (non-Windows miners), CGRemote will communicate with the miner directly. Both will allow you to change the miner if CGRemote has full API access, but on miners without CGWatcher these changes will not be saved because CGMiner/BFGMiner does not save changes sent to it via the API.

News/updates on CGRemote's progress will be posted on the CGWatcher page until it is released.

Cryptocables: Both applications will be open-source and on GitHub to allow others to contribute and so users with .NET experience can customize the software to their needs. I am new to GitHub so am learning how it works, otherwise I may have started out there. I've already created the repositories and they will be located at:

CGWatcher on GitHub: https://github.com/justinmilone/CGWatcher
CGRemote on GitHub: https://github.com/justinmilone/CGRemote

I have been rewriting/optimizing/fixing a lot of code now that I've had more time in preparation of this. For now, you can continue to download CGWatcher's newest versions at http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgwatcher.html. I don't update version numbers for small fixes (although this may change in the future) to allow for quick changes for users who are having a specific problem, without nagging all of the other users that an update is available. An optional auto-update feature is on the to-do list so you will always have the latest files without having to worry about checking and downloading manually.

ColonelPooteh: Thanks

[etbbtc]

that looks nice

[wedgy2k]

This is great, thank you.

[hodgson]

Nice update! Bitcoin donation sent.

[stbgefltc]

Just stumbled upon this thread, was gonna dev' my own monitor, but I guess I won't need to anymore. I'll give it a try when I get home, thanks for the work.

[joshki]

No worries...  I need a project at the moment... 

[kislam]

Hi,

Really nice program. Works great! Sent a small doantion (LTC)  

Would like to request a new feature -- Mining Profiles. I use multiple config files to start cgminer mining with different options (i.e. one config for starting with scrypt mining, another for sha256 mining). So if you could add the option to save mining profiles that restart cgminer to use different config files (obviously cgminer will have to be killed and restarted with new config file if we want to switch from sha256 to scrypt mining), then that would be great.

Also, please add an option to automatically switch abovementioned mining profile based on the most profitable mining option. For example, right now LTC mining is about 50% more profitable than BTC mining, but that might not be the case in the future, and the higher profitability may switch back and forth, (like TRC). So if we can have an option to (restart cgminer and) switch automatically to the most profitable profile upon regular checking, that would be great. There needs to be an option to wait minimum xx seconds before switching profile so that the miner does not switch too frequently.

thanks again for the great effort

Edit: Here's another strong case for Mining Profiles. I have been using cgwatcher while BTC mining. It has worked REALLY well, restarting my sick card flawlessly (which cgminer didn't/couldn't). But... today i switched to LTC mining while cgwatcher was running and monitoring as usual... well and good. But I was surprised to see the miner being restarted after a while without any reason or apparent problem. When I looked at the log I saw that it was restarted due to low hash rate, which I had set to 10% of my usual BTC hash rate. Well... duh! LTC hash rate is 1000-th of BTC hash rate. So if there was an option to set up different profiles, where I could set different target hash rates to montior, then this problem would disappear. So please consider this seriously along with the request for switching to most profitable chain...

Edit 2: another suggestion: checking the card's temperature is, in my opinion, the fastest way to realize that the card has stopped mining. Rapid temperature drop will notify the card crash much faster than both 'total hash rate checking' and 'total shares stop increasing'. There should be an option to restart the miner based on target lowest temperature since cgminer does a pretty decent job of maintaining a target temperature when auto-fan and auto-gpu options are set.

[DrGoose]

Looks great. I sent a 0.3 BTC donation to help for the development.

Looking forward for the code to be on GitHub so it can be recompiled and put on the "production" setup.

Thanks.

[gongbao]

Wow!! That is really nice work. Thank you

[milone]

hodgson: Thanks, I really appreciate it. I hope you will like the 1.1.4 update even more. It will be available this week.

kislam: Profiles are something I had already been working on because I've started mining different coins and I want to do as little work as possible to switch between them. That is what I love about writing software - the more time you put into developing it, the lazier you can be when using it.

As far as most profitable mining, this switches so often that you are probably better with picking one and sticking with it for a week. But I have noted this on my to-do list so when CGRemote and some of the other features get finished I will look more into it.

For now, http://dustcoin.com/mining is a great way to tell what the most profitable coin to mine is at the moment.

DrGoose: Thanks, very much appreciated. I have spent a lot of time over the past week working on it and the next update is a big one. GitHub is a top priority and I've been rewriting a lot of code so it is easier to follow and edit. Classes... everywhere.

Everyone else, thanks... the positive feedback is motivating. A few new surprises and a lot of improvements in version 1.1.4, hoping to have it finished by the weekend.

[wedgy2k]

GuiltySpark343, you can check the log (Log tab) to see if there were any reasons the miner was restarted. The Log tab displays the log since CGWatcher was started, but you can click Open in Notepad button to view the entire log history.

nwfella, not sure when I'll publish the source. Probably when I get done adding things and feel it is more complete. I have been commenting more in preparation for this.

LaudaM, do you use a comma (,) as the decimal separator? This caused hashrates to show very high ridiculous numbers, but is fixed in the next update.

voluntaryistonly, I have no dev experience on OSX so not something that is planned.

Once you setup a remote client-server type setup and release the source code, I would be interested in porting at least the remote monitor to OSX -- I don't know how many people are actually mining on OSX (I know it's possible but it does not seem common and it's a pain to setup), but I'm sure there are plenty of people who would want to remotely monitor a bunch of mining rigs using a macbook or something equivalent. 

I love this, thank you. But I would be orgasmic if the watcher was available on OSX.
Windows for mining, Mac for actually doing stuff!

[MonsterZero]

Everytime cgwatcher goes to refresh I get:
Status 'E' returned on command 'privileged'.

Any ideas?

[milone]

My guess is that you don't have full API access, or if it doesn't display hashrates... no API access. Make sure that either this is in the miner arguments:

Code:

--api-listen --api-allow W:127.0.0.1

or that these two lines are in the config file:

Code:

"api-listen" : true,
"api-allow" : "W:127.0.0.1"

(you may need to put a comma at the end of the second line depending on where in the config file you place it.)

I didn't intend for it to notify the user and log this continuously, just an oversight on my part because I got used to always having full API access enabled. If someone chooses to give read-only access (for some reason?) then it should provide info without nagging them, it will just be limited on making changes to the miner (GPU, Pool, etc), although even with read-only access it will still be able to start, stop, and restart the miner. This is fixed in 1.1.4, which should be available this weekend.

[kislam]

(you may need to put a comma at the end of the second line depending on where in the config file you place it.)

For clarification: if it is the last line of the config file, then don't put a comma at the end, otherwise do put a comma at the end.

[18RATTT]

kudos!! cant wait for the update this week and the release of CGremote.

[p00chie]

Hey.

1st: Great program
2nd: Do you have something link a dummy "cgminer.conf" file? I haven't found anything like a description of all commands i can put into it. Describe more than 1 pool and different graphic settings.
3rd: Do you think that this programm can detect crashes of graphics card better? We have a new mining rig and it crashes sometimes without any help from the amd driver. The system just hangs up with settings too high (but it worked with single cards)

[cavalier9976]

Looks nice will give it a go

[sydameton]

Hi, new here.

Greap app with a lot of promise, liking it.

I tried it hoping it would solve my random cgminer.exe has caused and error and crashed problems, but this time after I woke up I found them both non-responsive, with the same old notification for cgminer. Clicked close, they both disappeared. Oh well.

[Sawtoothsquid]

Great program. Thank you very much.

[milone]

1.1.4 is available. It should fix most bugs, and if it doesn't it will at least introduce some new ones to keep the old ones from feeling lonely. If you find it doesn't fix your problem or creates a new one, please let me know.

Thanks.