5 Key Considerations for Monitoring Blockchains
By: Varun Jain
Tags: Blockchain, Distributed Ledgers, Private Blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric, Quorum

Businesses are increasingly investigating and adopting Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and Blockchains (together “blockchains”) as alternatives to traditional centralized use-case solutions. As these blockchains are built and tested, companies need to actively monitor and audit their platform. The team here at BlocWatch, the leading blockchain monitoring solution, suggests these 5 key considerations for monitoring your enterprise blockchain implementations.

Know your Actors

As with any solution, security is imperative, and organizations should understand their network boundaries as well as who is able to have access into the network perimeter. With private blockchains, this means understanding what nodes have access, the manner in which they connect, and what roles they play. Some of the key metrics for actors that should be tracked include:

Authentication: IP addresses, network segments, API Key, Timestamps

Network Statistics: Data transfer, Uptime, Hours of operation

Roles and Privileges: Are actors accessing what they should, and are they limited

2. Perform Benchmark Testing

After the network is established, it’s time to benchmark the network to understand its limitations, and consequences of when the limits are met. Understanding these limitations allows architects to create guidelines for operations, and to determine preemptive scaling procedures. Some common performance indicators include:

Minimum/maximum bandwidth

Transaction success rate

Transaction read throughput

Transaction read latency

Host resource consumption (CPU, Memory, IO, Bandwidth)

3. Baseline Your Metrics

Your organization now knows it’s blockchain network limitations, and the next step is to understand what’s considered normal behavior in daily business operations. On a test network, sample transactions at expected volume and conditions should be sent to the network from the various actors to capture and establish the baseline.

This baseline can then be used alert on critical or unexpected events.

4. Alert on Critical Events

One of the most valuable features of a monitoring platform is the ability to alert using metrics and critical events. If transaction volume goes outside the expected range at a given time, an alert should be sent to the associated team to verify state and operations of the blockchain network. Some of the recommended events to trigger on are:

Unexpected spikes in transaction volume

Decrease in nodes

High number of transaction failure

Changes in smart contract/chain code

5. Smart Contract Change Control

Changes in Smart Contracts, or Chaincode in Hyperledger Fabric, are sent using transactions from peers; if endorsed and approved, these code upgrades can modify the functionality, approval process, or implications of the smart contract itself. Code upgrades should be isolated and alerted upon in order to confirm the validity of changes and to verify they are coming from approved sources.

Conclusions

Technology monitoring tools have been around for decades but unfortunately have historically been an afterthought for many organizations. It’s imperative that any enterprise or business system to monitored and alerted upon, and blockchain is not exempt from that. Production systems should have proper controls put into place, escalation paths, as well as incident response procedures. Depending upon your underlying chain format, tools such as Hyperledger Caliper or Amazon Managed Blockchain can help with items 2 and 5. BlocWatch can then assist with items 1,3, and 4 — and will integrate with these other tools.

If your blockchain requires a comprehensive monitoring solution, contact us at info@blocwatch.com for more information on how we can help your business meet its monitoring objectives.

Varun Jain is the Director of Solution Architecture at BlocWatch, a startup focused on monitoring, analytics and alerting on Distributed Ledger Technologies. BlocWatch provides a complete solution for enterprise blockchain enablement. Our software enables users to monitor chain health and transactions, identify suspicious actors, and alert on significant activity. We also provide independent third-party validation and attestation to enable customer assurance and ensure compliance satisfaction.

If you are interested and want to learn more, please contact us at info@blocwatch.com. You can also immediately start a free trial at app.blocwatch.com