The Alethio Platform Pt 3: Real-time Insights & Alerting with Alethio Monitoring
Alethio Monitoring enables developers, investors, and Ethereum enthusiasts to monitor & receive alerts on any account or smart contract in real time.
Our third article on the Alethio platform introduces Alethio Monitoring. With our Monitoring tool, users can set active, customizable monitors on any deployed smart contract or account. With these monitors in place, users will receive real-time alerts as soon as the desired condition or rule is met (e.g., token movement, call volume). Alethio Monitoring addresses a user’s need to access relevant on-chain data in real time without requiring that user to seek that information actively. By setting highly customizable, sophisticated alerts, users can ensure they are the first to know whenever something important — be it positive, negative, or simply interesting — happens on chain.
The Problem
A new block is added to the Ethereum blockchain every 14 seconds. The network processes an increasingly immense number of transactions each day across a rising number of unique (and connected) accounts. The growing complexity of transaction activity on Ethereum means deciphering those on-chain events becomes exponentially more difficult and requires considerable time and effort.
The Solution
Alethio Monitoring streamlines a user’s ability to maintain a higher level of on-chain intelligence than what’s possible through manual searching alone. Instead of actively watching every account or smart contract pertinent to you, your business, or your research (which is unrealistic anyway), users can create a canvas of alerts that passively monitors these on chain accounts in the background. These monitors will then send real-time notifications when certain conditions are met. Passive, customizable monitoring can substantially augment a user’s ability to make informed decisions based on on-chain data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfY0zd-dNNk&feature=youtu.be
From actively tracking account activity to ensuring the security of your deployed smart contract, Alethio Monitoring helps you sift through the noise and ensure you stay ahead of important on-chain activity. We’ll spend the rest of the article walking through setting up Alethio Monitoring and diving into a few key use cases & features. We will share additional posts as additional features come online. To check out what else Alethio can do, read our posts about our API, Block Explorer, and Reporting Tool.
Setting up an Alert
You can set up alerts on any Ethereum address. Go to monitoring.aleth.io, and press Add Target (first, you’ll need a free Alethio account, which gives you access to our whole suite of products). To add a target you can either provide the address manually and set a label, or use the search box to look through our list of labeled accounts, such as tokens or smart contracts.
To make it easier for you, we’ve reorganized the structure of alerts by grouping them by the target that is being tracked. This makes it easier to manage your alerts and targets.
After you’ve successfully added your first target it’s time to add an alert. You can monitor metrics derived from the account’s holdings — either ether or any ERC20 token — or the account’s on-chain activity, specifically its incoming transaction volume, direct or internal and filtered based on the payload. We’re working on a more powerful way to define a wider range of metrics, so stay tuned!
Once you’ve chosen a metric, you can define the conditions in which the alert is triggered either as a “threshold vale” (notify me when the metric reaches a certain value) or a “relative change” (notify me when the metric grows/shrinks by a certain percentage).
After all the details of an alert are set up, you can select how you want to be notified. We started with e-mail and quickly added Slack based on user feedback. Let us know what other notification channels you’d like!
Some Example Use Cases
- Smart Contract Security: Set alerts modeled around the normative behavior of your smart contracts & receive alerts the moment things go awry (e.g. unexpected spikes in call volume)
- Competitive Intelligence: Track activity of wallets & smart contracts associated with key competitors to proactively understand critical developments that may impact your business or users.
- Key Account Monitoring: Track key wallets & smart contracts associated with whales, centralized exchanges, and large token holders to proactively understand how large movements of funds can potentially impact market dynamics.
- User Adoption & Engagement: Track changes in smart contract activity to measure impact of product releases and updates on user engagement.
The Road Ahead
We’re looking forward to engaging the community and evolving our platform to better address your needs. In the near term, we’re working on a log of incidents (e.g., past triggered alerts and the conditions that triggered them), that will help you drill down the target’s behavior.
Another forthcoming big release will add compelling visualizations to the metrics and significantly extend our metric definition capabilities! Do you want to visualize the average gas cost of incoming transactions to your smart contract and get notified when it reaches a certain value, we’ve got you covered. Do you want to see how many contract calls you’re getting as direct transactions vs internal transactions from a proxy contract, we’ve got you covered. Do you want to see how many unique addresses per day interact with your smart contract? Yep. we’ve got you covered.
We’re also working on greater integration with our other tools — keep an eye out for DeFi monitoring!
Stay in Touch
Questions? Feedback? Drop us a note at support@aleth.io — we’d love to hear back from you!
Website: company.aleth.io/blockchain-monitoring
Follow us on Twitter: @AlethioEthstats
Interested in exploring an integration or getting early access to premium versions of our tools? Reach out to partnerships@aleth.io for more information.
