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celestia-node metrics

This tutorial is for running metrics for your celestia-node data availability instance. This tutorial will focus on running metrics for a light node.

This tutorial assumes you have already setup your light node by following the tutorial in the celestia-node API tutorial.

Running metrics flags

You can enable the celestia-node metric flags with the following command:

sh
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=<boolean> \
    --metrics --metrics.endpoint <URI> \
    --p2p.network <network> --core.ip <URI>
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=<boolean> \
    --metrics --metrics.endpoint <URI> \
    --p2p.network <network> --core.ip <URI>

Add metrics flags to your node start command and restart your node to apply it. The metrics endpoint will gather your node's data to track your uptime.

Note that the --metrics flag enables metrics and expects an input into --metrics.endpoint.

We will go over what the endpoint will need to be in the metrics endpoint design considerations section.

Mainnet Beta

Here is an example for Mainnet Beta:

sh
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=true \
    --metrics --metrics.endpoint otel.celestia.observer \
    --core.ip <URI>
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=true \
    --metrics --metrics.endpoint otel.celestia.observer \
    --core.ip <URI>

Mocha testnet

Here is an example for Mocha testnet:

sh
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=true \
    --metrics --metrics.endpoint otel.celestia-mocha.com \
    --core.ip <URI> --p2p.network mocha
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=true \
    --metrics --metrics.endpoint otel.celestia-mocha.com \
    --core.ip <URI> --p2p.network mocha

TLS connections

The --metrics.tls flag enables or disables a TLS connection to the OpenTelemetry Protocol metrics backend. You need to choose a boolean value (true or false) for this flag.

It's also common to set this flag to false when spinning up a local collector to check the metrics locally.

However, if the collector is hosted in the cloud as a separate entity (like in a DevOps environment), enabling TLS is a necessity for secure communication.

Here are examples of how to use it:

bash
# To enable TLS connection
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=true --metrics \
    --metrics.endpoint <URI> \
    --p2p.network <network> --core.ip <URI>

# To disable TLS connection
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=false --metrics \
    --metrics.endpoint <URI> \
    --p2p.network <network> --core.ip <URI>
# To enable TLS connection
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=true --metrics \
    --metrics.endpoint <URI> \
    --p2p.network <network> --core.ip <URI>

# To disable TLS connection
celestia <node-type> start --metrics.tls=false --metrics \
    --metrics.endpoint <URI> \
    --p2p.network <network> --core.ip <URI>

Metrics endpoint design considerations

At the moment, the architecture of celestia-node metrics works as specified in the following ADR #010.

Essentially, the design considerations here will necessitate running an OpenTelemetry (OTEL) collector that connects to Celestia light node.

For an overview of OTEL, check out the guide.

The ADR and the OTEL docs will help you run your collector on the metrics endpoint. This will then allow you to process the data in the collector on a Prometheus server which can then be viewed on a Grafana dashboard.

In the future, we do want to open-source some developer toolings around this infrastructure to allow for node operators to be able to monitor their data availability nodes.