Monitoring the Nuts Node

Basic service health

A status endpoint is provided to check if the service is running and if the web server has been started. The endpoint is available over http so it can be used by a wide range of health checking services. It does not provide any information on the individual engines running as part of the executable. The main goal of the service is to give a YES/NO answer for if the service is running?

GET /status

It’ll return an “OK” response and a 200 status code.

Basic diagnostics

GET /status/diagnostics

It’ll return some text displaying the current status of the various services:

Status
    Registered engines: [Status Logging]
Logging
    verbosity: INFO

If you supply application/json for the Accept HTTP header it will return the diagnostics in JSON format.

Metrics

The Nuts service executable has build-in support for Prometheus. Prometheus is a time-series database which supports a wide variety of services. It also allows for exporting metrics to different visualization solutions like Grafana. See https://prometheus.io/ for more information on how to run Prometheus. The metrics are exposed at /metrics

Configuration

In order for metrics to be gathered by Prometheus. A job has to be added to the prometheus.yml configuration file. Below is a minimal configuration file that will only gather Nuts metrics:

# my global config
global:
  scrape_interval:     15s # Set the scrape interval to every 15 seconds. Default is every 1 minute.
  evaluation_interval: 15s # Evaluate rules every 15 seconds. The default is every 1 minute.
  # scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).

# Load rules once and periodically evaluate them according to the global 'evaluation_interval'.
rule_files:
# - "first_rules.yml"
# - "second_rules.yml"

# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
scrape_configs:
  # The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
  - job_name: 'nuts'
    metrics_path: '/metrics'
    scrape_interval: 5s
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['127.0.0.1:1323']

It’s important to enter the correct IP/domain and port where the Nuts node can be found!

Exported metrics

The Nuts service executable exports the following metric namespaces:

  • nuts_ contains metrics related to the functioning of the Nuts node

  • process_ contains OS metrics related to the process

  • go_ contains Go metrics related to the process

  • http_ contains metrics related to HTTP calls to the Nuts node

  • promhttp_ contains metrics related to HTTP calls to the Nuts node’s /metrics endpoint

Network DAG Visualization

All network transactions form a directed acyclic graph (DAG) which helps achieving consistency and data completeness. Since it’s a hard to debug, complex structure, the network API provides a visualization which can be queried from /internal/network/v1/diagnostics/graph. It is returned in the dot format which can then be rendered to an image using dot or graphviz (given you saved the output to input.dot):

dot -T png -o output.png input.dot

Using query parameters start and end it is possible to retrieve a range of transactions. /internal/network/v1/diagnostics/graph?start=10&end=12 will return a graph with all transactions containing Lamport Clock 10 and 11. Both parameters need to be non-negative integers, and start < end. If no value is provided, start=0 and end=inf. Querying a range can be useful if only a certain range is of interest, but may also be required to generate the graph using dot.

CPU profiling

It’s possible to enable CPU profiling by passing the --cpuprofile=/some/location.dmp option. This will write a CPU profile to the given location when the node shuts down. The resulting file can be analyzed with Go tooling:

go tool pprof /some/location.dmp

The tooling includes a help function to get you started. To get started use the web command inside the tooling. It’ll open a SVG in a browser and give an overview of what the node was doing.