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Metrics

Anchor comes pre-built with a suite of metrics for developers or users to monitor the health and performance of the node.

They must be enabled at runtime using the --metrics CLI flag.

Usage

In order to run a metrics server, docker is required to be installed.

Once docker is installed, a metrics server can be run locally via the following steps:

  1. Start an anchor node with $ anchor --metrics
    • The --metrics flag is required for metrics.
  2. Move into the metrics directory $ cd metrics.
  3. Bring the environment up with $ docker-compose up --build -d.
  4. Ensure that Prometheus can access your Anchor node by ensuring it is in the UP state at http://localhost:9090/targets.
  5. Browse to http://localhost:3000
    • Username: admin
    • Password: changeme
  6. Import some dashboards from the metrics/dashboards directory in this repo:
    • In the Grafana UI, go to Dashboards -> Manage -> Import -> Upload .json file.
    • The anchor-dash.json dashboard is a good place to start.

Dashboards

A suite of dashboards can be found in metrics/dashboard directory. The Anchor team will frequently update these dashboards as new metrics are introduced.

We welcome Pull Requests for any users wishing to add their dashboards to this repository for others to share.

Scrape Targets

Prometheus periodically reads the metrics/scrape-targets/scrape-targets.json file. This file tells Prometheus which endpoints to collect data from. The current file is setup to read from Anchor on its default metrics port. You can add additional endpoints if you want to collect metrics from other servers.

An example is Lighthouse. You can collect metrics from Anchor and Lighthouse simultaneously if they are both running. We have an example file scrape-targets-lighthouse.json which allows this. You can replace the scrape-targets.json file with the contents of scrape-targets-lighthouse.json if you wish to collect metrics from Anchor and Lighthouse simultaneously.

Hosting Publicly

By default Prometheus and Grafana will only bind to localhost (127.0.0.1), in order to protect you from accidentally exposing them to the public internet. If you would like to change this you must edit the http_addr in metrics/grafana/grafana.ini.