Crown Platform Monitor
A visualisation tool for the Crown network and blockchain
Today we are pleased to announce the availability of the Crown Platform Monitor, a visualisation tool for the Crown network. It is actually a subset of the forthcoming Crown Node Manager, a fork of the Bitcoin Node Manager as suggested in Gitlab issue 326. The full node manager functionality will not be available until after the Bitcoin v0.17 codebase update. Both the Crown Platform Monitor and Crown Node Manager add several classes of network/blockchain information not reported in the Bitcoin Node Manager.
Most of the information the Crown Platform Monitor provides is already available from other sources, principally the crown-cli tool or debug console in the GUI wallet. Some of it is presented in tools like the various block explorers or CrownCentral.net, but this is the only tool which attempts to present it all in a nice graphical interface in one place.
Additionally the Crown Node Manager will provide control functions, mainly in the area of peer management. This functionality requires RPC features which are not available in Crown v0.14 but will be present after the forthcoming codebase update. There is much less heterogeneity in the Crown network than the Bitcoin network so it’s unclear at this point how useful most of the extra functionality will be. However, one feature which is expected to be useful, and would have been useful recently, is the ability to ban and unban peers.
As a service to the community we are running an instance of the Platform Monitor on one of the Crown Platform infrastructure servers. Anyone is welcome to connect to it at https://monitor.crownplatform.com
We are keen to receive feedback on what you like or dislike about it, what you would change, what additional features you would find useful. Merge requests are very welcome, as are donations if you feel so inclined at CRWHoXPTYBrFdSN8fL15jfdAD6iAapHvpUCQ.
Anyone can run their own copy of the Platform Monitor but it needs a web server on the same machine as the Crown daemon and a modicum of technical ability to install and configure it. The requirements for the Node Manager will be the same. The Node Manager is something people will be expected to run for themselves if they are interested in the additional functionality it offers.
The code for both tools is currently in walkjivefly’s Github crown-node-manager repository. Node Manager is on the master branch, Platform Monitor is on the crown-platform-monitor branch.
Tell us what you think
Discord is the best place for general feedback.
Github is preferred for problem reports and essential for code contributions.
