I think there a few different possible ways to go here.

One is to try and simplify the setup of all the components so it all gets installed together. That might be feasible in some quite restricted setups but the installation instructions for Graphite look kind of terrifying.

Another is to export stats over regular TCP and make them public so literally anyone can listen to the stats feed for any node. Then people who dig stats and graphs could work on stats aggregators that give global network visibility independently, effectively crawling the p2p network for data. It'd have the advantage of having zero setup for the node operators and not require much in the way of resources.

For what it's worth, although the environment is a bit different inside Google the latter approach is used. Monitoring servers locate servers of interest via a discovery service, connect to them and start streaming stats data into a database service that can then be queried later to get graphs. 

The stats are also run through various rules to obtain alerts about problematic conditions. For example, if a subset of the network splits it might be hard to notice that if the node operators aren't paying attention and Matt's fork alert/emailing code isn't set up. But if there was a site crawling nodes and aggregating chain heights by version, that could trigger an alert to people who are paying attention.

I know from practical experience that monitoring and analysis tends to appeal more to certain types of people than others. So I quite like the "let anyone monitor" approach. However, it may not be appropriate in a P2P network, I did not think about it much.

Obviously I'm assuming none of the stats expose privacy sensitive data.

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 10:18 PM, Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 9:57 PM, Jameson Lopp <jameson.lopp@gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>

> I agree that it would be awesome to offer these types of stats with the installer; unfortunately the route I've taken has dependencies on several other other pieces of software to do all the heavy lifting of stats aggregation and chart rendering. I'm assuming that you would not want to build any of that processing into Bitcoin Core itself; would you be opposed to packaging other software along with the installer?

Depends on just how much stuff it is. The idea is primarily to have an
installer for running a (wallet-less) node as an OS background
service.

Having some statistics available would be worth some extra download
size, otherwise it would be pretty much invisible.

We'd already decided that we would need something like Python for the
stats service. Implementing things like web services in C++ is just
not realistic given the time constraints and the great already-written
code that is out there. As an optional tool it should be external, not
part of bitcoind itself.

I suppose the chart rendering happens client-side? In that case the
web service just has to collect and provide the data, and serve static
html/js files.

Wladimir

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