dotnet-counters

This guide will walk you through setting up performance counters using the dotnet-counters performance monitoring tool that observes counters published via the EventCounters API.

Step 1: Install dotnet-counters

dotnet-counters can be either installed locally or in a Docker container.

Installing locally

Use the dotnet tool install command as follows:

dotnet tool install -g dotnet-counters

Once installed, you can run the tool from the command line by typing dotnet-counters.

Installing in a Docker container

To install dotnet-counters in a Docker container, create a Dockerfile with the following content:

Dockerfile

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:8.0

RUN dotnet tool install -g dotnet-counters

ENV PATH="$PATH:/root/.dotnet/tools"

ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/bash"]

Then, build the Docker image:

docker build -t dotnet-counters .

Step 2: Run Nethermind

To enable performance counters in Nethermind, use the command line option --Metrics.CountersEnabled true. For more options, see the Metrics configuration section.

Important

A consensus client of your choice must be running before you start Nethermind.

Running locally

To enable performance counters, run Nethermind as follows:

nethermind -c mainnet --Metrics.CountersEnabled true

Running in a Docker container

The easiest way of collecting metrics in a Docker container is to use Docker Compose. Below, we use the Nethermind official Docker image and the dotnet-counters image we created earlier:

docker-compose.yml

services:

  dotnet-counters:
    image: dotnet-counters
    container_name: dotnet-counters
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true
    pid: service:nethermind
    volumes:
      - metrics:/tmp
    depends_on:
      - nethermind
  
  nethermind:
    image: nethermind/nethermind:latest
    container_name: nethermind
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8545:8545
      - 8551:8551
      - 30303:30303
    command: -c mainnet --Metrics.CountersEnabled true
    volumes:
      - ./keystore:/nethermind/keystore
      - ./logs:/nethermind/logs
      - ./nethermind_db:/nethermind/nethermind_db
      - metrics:/tmp

volumes:
  metrics:

info

dotnet-counters uses IPC socket communication to monitor the target process. For this, we use the metrics volume to share the IPC socket directory with the nethermind and dotnet-counter services. The pid option in the dotnet-counters service is used to share the PID namespace with the nethermind service. This is necessary for dotnet-counters to be able to see the Nethermind process.

We can run the above file as follows:

docker compose up

Step 3: Collect metrics

Once dotnet-counters is installed and Nethermind is running, we can start collecting the metrics. If you chose to collect metrics in the containers, run the following command in the dotnet-counters container:

dotnet-counters collect -n nethermind

By default, dotnet-counters stores the collected metrics in the current directory in CSV format. However, you may also store them in JSON format and another directory. For instance:

dotnet-counters collect -n nethermind -f json -o /tmp/counters.json

For more info about dotnet-counters, see its official docs.