Take Your Smart Contract Development to the Next Level With Tenderly

Samson Adesanoye
Coinmonks
7 min readFeb 10, 2023

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Congratulations you just deployed your smart contract, what next? Monitoring your smart contract, replicating transactions saving debugging hours and cost, prevent your smart contract hacks with notifications and actions; Tenderly provides these services with few clicks.

https://tenderly.co/

What is Tenderly?

Tenderly is an all-in-one development platform, which enables Web3 developers to build, test, monitor, and operate smart contracts. It started as Debugger for inspecting and fixing smart contract bugs and production issues by using a fast and intuitive tool to analyze precise lines of code in a human-readable format.

tenderly logo

Tenderly Services

Monitoring: Tenderly enables you to stay informed about the status of your smart contracts by providing real-time, accurate blockchain data, ensuring that everything is proceeding as intended.

Alerting: Tenderly allows you to stay informed about the activity of your smart contracts and wallets through customizable alert notifications that can be delivered to your preferred channel.

Web3 Gateway: A node as a service for reliable interaction with the blockchain. It also offers simulation capabilities, allowing you to evaluate the execution of a transaction on-chain without incurring gas costs.

Web3 Actions: An automated serverless backend used to respond swiftly to both on-chain and off-chain events by executing custom code in a matter of milliseconds.

Simulator: Test custom solutions and play out transaction outcomes before sending them on-chain for confident execution both in development and production.

War Rooms: Follow a structured war room framework to guide your team, secure funds, minimize potential damage, and act quickly in case of a security breach.

Analytics: Rely on real-time blockchain data and track metrics essential to your project to respond to crucial events and stay one step ahead of the competition.

How much does Tenderly Cost?

Tenderly offers a pricing plan tailored for every stage of your product. Its plans cover Free, Gateway, Dev, Pro, and Pro+.
The free plan comes with Forks, Visual Debugger, Transaction Overview (State Changes, Decoded Events, Tokens Transferred), Advanced Trace Search, and Tenderly Web3 Gateway Free Tier. etc. Learn more about Tenderly Pricing.

https://tenderly.co/pricing

What Chain/Network Does Tenderly Support?

As of the time of writing tenderly support different chains ranging from Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain(BSC), etc.

Project using Tenderly

Tenderly is currently used by industry leaders such as AAVE, OpenZeppelin, Maker, Polygon, InstaDApp, 0x, Chainlink, etc.

How Tenderly works?

Tenderly has its own Ethereum virtual machine(EVM). They take a snapshot of all the data from the blockchains they support and present it in human-readable form by retracing the transaction on their EVM.

https://tenderly.co/monitoring

Tenderly Transaction

Transactions are mostly invocation of function on a smart contract. Tenderly keep track of every piece of code that happened in a transaction presenting it in a human-readable form. Let’s dive into Tenderly transactions: create a Tenderly account first.

  1. Add smart contract Address: To enjoy tenderly the smart contract has to be verified, you can verify your smart contract on tenderly or on Etherscan. Without verification Tenderly shows random numbers instead of a human-readable form.
    Navigate to Transactions and click Add Contracts button.

In this example, we will be using Dai stable coin (DAI). DAI is a stablecoin by MakerDAO on the Ethereum blockchain which is pegged with the United State dollar(USD). Head over to https://etherscan.io/tokens to find a token.

Copy the contract address: Locate the copy button close to the address.

Paste contract address: Navigate to Transactions where Add contract modal is opened. Paste the copied contract address, select the network as mainnet. when done click Add Contract button.

Automatically, Transactions tab now shows all transaction confirm on Dai stablecoin.

  1. Filter Transaction: This gives the ability to filter transactions on the table based on success, failed, etc. This does not come with a free account though.

2. Configure Columns: Allows the ability to add or remove columns on the table, with a toggle switch.

Configure Columns Settings

Let’s analyse a single transaction, in this example, we will be using a failed transaction, kindly use the paginator at the bottom of the table to navigate.

Failed transaction

Analysing a single transaction

Click on the Transaction Hash(Tx Hash) to select a single transaction.

Analysing a single transaction

1. Overview: It shows a summary of what went down in the transaction including.
Stack Trace: This is the path the transaction took.
Stack Trace Overview: Everything that happens in the transaction till it gets to its failed state. You can search through the trace, and jump between; revert by clicking show revert. Functions can easily be annotated which
can help when debugging a problem and collaborating in a team.

2. Contracts: This shows all the contracts that are involved in the transaction. In this particular transaction UniswapV3Pool, OlympusERC20Token, Dai, Vault etc. contracts were involved.

3. Events: For a failed transaction there is no event, checking a successful transaction from the dashboard brings a beautiful view of all the events that were called by different smart contracts. Events in a single transaction can be filtered by contracts or event names.

4. State Changes: This shows all the state changes of all the contracts that participated in the execution of this transaction in human-readable form.

5. Debugger: Debugger allows movement through the call trace of the smart contracts involved in the transaction. Tenderly Debugger is a Jump by jump debugger, which allows the view of all the functions that were involved in the calls to external contracts or calls to function, with comment support to discuss hacks and likes.
Though not all contract sources are available for debugging.

6. Gas Profiler: This is like the flame graph in the CPU but for transactions. It shows how much gas your transaction consumes; including a deep analysis of the amount each function is consuming. This can help you in your decision on optimizing gas usage and saving the customer money.

7. Re-Simulate: This load up the transaction in the Simulator, which gives you access to re-run the same transaction, which you can use to debug what might have gone wrong.

8. View on Explorer: This opens up the transaction in Etherscan.
View on Explorer

View on Explorer

Why Tenderly?

As you have seen above, Tenderly features are powerful for smart contract development; and each feature compliment the other,
- It produces blockchain data in human-readable form.
- It keeps track of the event life cycle of smart contracts.
- It provides private smart contract verification.
- It offers transaction simulation which has been used by Instadapp.

Tenderly vs Competitor

As of the time of writing, no SaaS platform offers close to what Tenderly offers, the closest to its Etherscan which is a blockchain explorer.

https://etherscan.io

Conclusion

You now have an understanding of how Tenderly works, its features and how to use its transaction features. Create a Tenderly free account here and take your smart contract development to another level.

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