--- title: Monitoring a Validator --- ## Check Gossip Confirm the IP address and **identity pubkey** of your validator is visible in the gossip network by running: ```bash solana-gossip spy --entrypoint devnet.solana.com:8001 ``` ## Check Your Balance Your account balance should decrease by the transaction fee amount as your validator submits votes, and increase after serving as the leader. Pass the `--lamports` are to observe in finer detail: ```bash solana balance --lamports ``` ## Check Vote Activity The `solana vote-account` command displays the recent voting activity from your validator: ```bash solana vote-account ~/vote-account-keypair.json ``` ## Get Cluster Info There are several useful JSON-RPC endpoints for monitoring your validator on the cluster, as well as the health of the cluster: ```bash # Similar to solana-gossip, you should see your validator in the list of cluster nodes curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1, "method":"getClusterNodes"}' http://devnet.solana.com # If your validator is properly voting, it should appear in the list of `current` vote accounts. If staked, `stake` should be > 0 curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1, "method":"getVoteAccounts"}' http://devnet.solana.com # Returns the current leader schedule curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1, "method":"getLeaderSchedule"}' http://devnet.solana.com # Returns info about the current epoch. slotIndex should progress on subsequent calls. curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1, "method":"getEpochInfo"}' http://devnet.solana.com ``` ## Validator Metrics Metrics are available for local monitoring of your validator. Docker must be installed and the current user added to the docker group. Then download `solana-metrics.tar.bz2` from the Github Release and run ```bash tar jxf solana-metrics.tar.bz2 cd solana-metrics/ ./start.sh ``` A local InfluxDB and Grafana instance is now running on your machine. Define `SOLANA_METRICS_CONFIG` in your environment as described at the end of the `start.sh` output and restart your validator. Metrics should now be streaming and visible from your local Grafana dashboard. ## Timezone For Log Messages Log messages emitted by your validator include a timestamp. When sharing logs with others to help triage issues, that timestamp can cause confusion as it does not contain timezone information. To make it easier to compare logs between different sources we request that everybody use Pacific Time on their validator nodes. In Linux this can be accomplished by running: ```bash sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles /etc/localtime ```