Nethermind 1.9.46 version comes with a Nethermind.HealthChecks.dll plugin that allows you to monitor your Nethermind node better. It leverages the power of AspNetCore.Diagnostics.HealthChecks. It simply adds an/healthendpoint to the JSON RPC service which can be used to check the Nethermind's liveness - verify if the node is synced and has at least one peer. Useful when you don't want to query the node before it's able to provide you data available only for fully synced nodes like eth_getBalance.

Add plugin to your node

At the bottom of each release in the Assets section, the plugins package is included.

• Download the plugins package and inside extract its content into plugins directory

wget https://github.com/NethermindEth/nethermind/releases/download/1.9.45/plugins-1.9.45-6444e38-20201201.zip
unzip plugins-1.9.45-6444e38-20201201.zip -d plugins

The Nethermind.HealthChecks.dllplugin will be automatically loaded on Nethermind start.

Enabling and configuring Health Checks

The health checks need to be additionally enabled which can be done either through --HealthChecks.* flags or by adding a "HealthChecks" section to the config file.

  "HealthChecks": {
    "Enabled": true,
    "WebhooksEnabled": true,
    "WebhooksUri": "https://slack.webhook",
    "UIEnabled": true,
    "PollingInterval": 10,
    "Slug": "/api/health"
  }

Each configuration option is described here:

Enabling Health Checks without UI

./Nethermind.Runner --HealthChecks.Enabled true

The health endpoint is now available at localhost:8545/health by default (if your --JsonRpc.Port is 8545). The health endpoint can be configured via --HealthChecks.Slug parameter e.g. --HealthChecks.Slug /api/health. We can if it is working with curl:

// Request
curl localhost:8545/health
​
// Example of response for Unhealthy node
{"status":"Unhealthy","totalDuration":"00:00:00.0015582","entries":{"node-health":{"data":{},"description":"The node has 0 peers connected","duration":"00:00:00.0003881","status":"Unhealthy","tags":[]}}}
​
// Example of response for Healthy node
{"status":"Healthy","totalDuration":"00:00:00.0015582","entries":{"node-health":{"data":{},"description":"The node is now fully synced with a network, number of peers: 99","duration":"00:00:00.0003881","status":"Healthy","tags":[]}}}

• Unhealthy returns 503 (Service Unavailable) status code

• Healthy returns 200 status code

Enabling Health Checks UI

./Nethermind.Runner --HealthChecks.Enabled true --HealthChecks.UIEnabled true

Enabling UI will expose an additional endpoint /healthchecks-uiand will allow seeing node's health on a nice UI. To view the UI simply go to http://localhost:8545/healthchecks-ui.

Enabling Slack reports

We may also add Slack Webhook endpoint to which our node's health will be reported. We need to pass the --HealthChecks.WebhooksEnabled true and add the --HealthChecks.WebhooksUri which can be found in your Slack app configuration.

./Nethermind.Runner --HealthChecks.Enabled true --HealthChecks.UIEnabled true --HealthChecks.WebhooksEnabled true --HealthChecks.WebhooksUri https://hooks.slack.com/

If your node will be Unhealthy you should receive the following message:

and when it becomes Healthy (synced and with peers):