Find out How to Monitor the Status of an Ethereum Network

Sometimes visualization helps us to understand complex things with a little bit of ease. So, with the help of this blog, you can visualize various stats and information for the ethereum blockchain network:

Components

• ethereum node
• eth-net-intelligence-api
• eth-netstats

About the components:

We need to setup two tools that are eth-net-intelligence-api(backend) and eth-netstats(frontend) considering your ethereum blockchain server is already up and running.
eth-net-intelligence-api is the backend service that runs with ethereum and monitors the state of the network, retrieves the information via JSON-RPC, and connects to eth-netstats to feed information via WebSockets and eth-netstats is a visual gui for tracking the ethereum network status.

Prerequisite

• git
• node
• npm
• pm2

Steps:

1) Install pm2 globally (pm2 helps us to manage the long run applications)

npm install pm2@latest -g

2) Setup eth-net-intelligence-api service

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/cubedro/eth-net-intelligence-api.git

switch the directory

cd eth-net-intelligence-api

Configure the eth-net-intelligence-api to be able to connect to the eth server, just edit the app.json file with appropriate details.

vim app.json

"name": The name which will appear in the pm2 process manager for your node app
"RPC_HOST": The IP address of your geth server
"RPC_PORT": The RPC port of your geth server
"LISTENING_PORT": The network listening port for your geth server
"INSTANCE_NAME": The name that will appear on the dashboard this node
"WS_SERVER": The server address for the frontend UI for eth-netstat
"WS_SECRET": The secret used to connect the frontend and backend tools

Start the app

pm2 start app.json

3) Setup eth-netstats

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/cubedro/eth-netstats.git 

cd eth-netstats

Install the dependencies

npm install
sudo npm install -g grunt-cli

To build the full version

grunt

To start

WS_SECRET=example npm start

Where example should be replaced by secret defined in app.json during configuration of eth-net-intelligence-api service.
Deployed!!

Now you can access the frontend at url http://localhost:3000