Announcing PANIC — a blockchain infrastructure monitoring solution
PANIC is an open-source tool for monitoring blockchain infrastructure, and can work on Cosmos-SDK, Substrate or Chainlink-based nodes.
PANIC gives node operators insight into the state of their nodes, alerting them through multiple channels in case of issues that may degrade the availability of their nodes.
The tool was developed by SimplyVC with grant funding from the Interchain Foundation, as part of its mission to invest in projects that improve and expand the Interchain ecosystem.
Let’s look at some of the many benefits of PANIC:
- A comprehensive set of out-of-the-box alerts with corresponding severities and thresholds. Alerts can be customized to better suit operational needs.
- PANIC is built from a node operator’s perspective. So while other tooling installations can be complex and time-consuming, PANIC has an intuitive, quick, step-by-step installation process.
- It leverages a wide variety of alerting channels, ensuring that PANIC is a good fit for most teams.
- The UI helps teams monitor the health of their setups while easily identifying events that might require intervention.
How does it work?
PANIC provides node operators with a real-time picture of the performance of the host systems, across multiple chains, with colour coded values to easily identify issues as they might arise.
Specifically, PANIC allows node operators to monitor their :
- Cosmos nodes — through monitoring Prometheus metrics, REST, and Tendermint RPC.
- Cosmos networks — through monitoring the nodes’ REST endpoint.
- Host systems the nodes are running on.
- GitHub and DockerHub repository releases.
In the event a change in state occurs or a monitorable exceeds its pre-set threshold, an alert is sent via channels configured by the operator during installation. The following is an extract of alerts that can be raised by PANIC.
Node alerts — Inform the user of node activity. PANIC comes with over forty node alerts. Examples of these alerts including nodes being inactive, slash or jail events, missing blocks above a certain threshold, etc.
Network alerts — Used to give information about events that are related to the blockchain. For example, node operators are alerted when a new proposal has been submitted to the governance forum, and when a governance proposal has concluded with the respective result returned.
System alerts — Used to provide information about the performance of host systems. For example, CPU usage increased/decreased in relation to a threshold value.
GitHub alerts — These centre around new releases. An alert is issued when a new release is published for a repository.
DockerHub alerts — Alerts are issued in relation to tag activity. Examples include the publishing of a new tag for a repository, and updating/deleting of existing tags.
PANIC uses a variety of alerting channels to ensure the product aligns itself well with the processes used by the teams using it, including:
- Telegram
- Slack
- Opsgenie
- PagerDuty
- Twilio — This is used for critical alerts only. The alert triggers a phone call to grab the operator’s attention.
- Console
- Alerts log
Ready to PANIC?
Simply follow the guided, step-by-step installation process here.
About SimplyVC
Simply VC runs reliable and secure infrastructure in their own data centre in Malta, built with the aim of supporting the growth of the Blockchain Ecosystem. They contribute to the networks they support by developing open-source ecosystem tools and core blockchain modules.
Read more about us on our website, Twitter and Medium.
About the author: Paul Falzon
Coming from a customer service, quality assurance, and product management background in igaming, Paul wanted to put his experience to good use and be a part of something more meaningful by joining Simply VC and its vision to help build a decentralised, egalitarian world.
