Geth collector

Go Ethereum, written in Google’s Go language, is one of the three original implementations of the Ethereum protocol, alongside C++ and Python.

Go-Ethereum, and subsequently Geth, are built and maintained by the Ethereum community. It’s open source which means anyone can contribute to Geth through its GitHub.

With Netdata, you can effortlessly monitor your Geth node

Requirements

Run geth with the flag --metrics. That will enable the metric server, with default port 6060 and path /debug/metrics/prometheus.

Metrics

All metrics have "geth." prefix.

Metric	Scope	Dimensions	Units
eth_db_chaindata_ancient_io_rate	global	reads, writes	bytes/s
eth_db_chaindata_ancient_io	global	reads, writes	bytes
eth_db_chaindata_disk_io	global	reads, writes	bytes
goroutines	global	goroutines	goroutines
eth_db_chaindata_disk_io_rate	global	reads, writes	bytes/s
chaindata_db_size	global	level_db, ancient_db	bytes
chainhead	global	block, receipt, header	block
tx_pool_pending	global	invalid, pending, local, discard, no_funds, ratelimit, replace	transactions
tx_pool_current	global	invalid, pending, local, pool	transactions
tx_pool_queued	global	discard, eviction, no_funds, ratelimit	transactions
p2p_bandwidth	global	ingress, egress	bytes/s
reorgs	global	executed	reorgs
reorgs_blocks	global	added, dropped	blocks
p2p_peers	global	peers	peers
p2p_peers_calls	global	dials, serves	calls/s
rpc_calls	global	failed, successful	calls/s

Contribute

We have started a topic on our community forums about this collector.

The best contribution you can make is to tell us what metrics you want to see and how they should be organized (e.g. what charts to make).

As you can read in the topic, it's trivial to add more metrics from the prometheus endpoint and create the relevant charts. The hard part is the domain expertise that we don't have, but you, as a user, have.

The second-best contribution you can make is to tell us what alerts we should be shipping as defaults for this collector. For example, we are shipping an alert about the node being in sync (or not). We simply compare the chainhead block and header values.

If you are proficient in Golang, visit the topic and make a PR yourself to the collector. We will happily help you to merge it and have your code being shipped with every Netdata agent.

Configuration

Edit the go.d/geth.conf configuration file using edit-config from the Netdata config directory, which is typically at /etc/netdata.

cd /etc/netdata # Replace this path with your Netdata config directory
sudo ./edit-config go.d/geth.conf

Needs only url to geth metrics endpoint. Here is an example for 2 instances:

jobs:
  - name: geth_node_1
    url: http://203.0.113.10:6060/debug/metrics/prometheus

  - name: geth_node_2
    url: http://203.0.113.11:6060/debug/metrics/prometheus

For all available options please see module configuration file.

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot issues with the geth collector, run the go.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

• Navigate to the plugins.d directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the plugins setting under [directories].

  cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/

• Switch to the netdata user.

  sudo -u netdata -s

• Run the go.d.plugin to debug the collector:

  ./go.d.plugin -d -m geth

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