Ethereum Ethstats

Learning the Ethereum Blockchain through its metrics.

Posted by Craig Johnston on Saturday, September 22, 2018

The eth-netstats project provides a great dashboard interface for monitoring the status of an Ethereum Blockchain from the perspective of its nodes. The website https://ethstats.net/ reports statistics from an extensive list of Ethereum nodes on the public Ethereum Blockchain, however, the eth-netstats software that drives https://ethstats.net/ can also be used to monitor a Private Ethereum Blockchchain as I demonstrate in the previous article Deploy a Private Ethereum Blockchain on a Custom Kubernetes Cluster.

The eth-netstats service consumes Ethereum statistical metrics provided by individual Ethereum nodes. Check out the documentation on Geth if you are interested in running an Ethereum miner or transaction only node and pointing it’s statistical output to an eth-netstats instance.

In this article, I review each of the metrics displayed by eth-netstats, as both a means to better understand the eth-netstats utility as well as Ethereum itself.

Ethstats Dashboard

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See Ethstats in action at https://ethstats.net/ for a live example of Ethereum Blockchain metrics from miners on the public Ethereum blockchain.

The following table is a brief overview of the metrics displayed by eth-netstats starting from the top left, moving from left to right, row by row.

Image Metric Description
best block

Best Block

The Best Block is last valid block with the highest amount of accumulated work in it on the main Ethereum Blockchain.

Ethereum Uncles

Uncles

Uncles are orphaned blocks that were mined just after someone else found the correct block header. Ethereum treats orphaned blocks different than other blockchain systems by including them in the blockchain and rewarding miner for them. Ethstats displays the current block's uncle count and uncle count of the last 50 blocks.

last block

Last Block

Ethstats displays the elapsed time since the last block was mined.

average block time

Average Block Time

The average time between block generation, not including uncles.

Average Network Hashrate

Average Network Hashrate

The number of hashes per second processed by miners on the network in order to find a new block. The Network in this case being miners reporting to Ethstats.

Ethereum Difficulty

Difficulty

The current difficulty to mine a new block by finding a matching hash.

Active Ethereum nodes

Active Nodes

The number of nodes currently connected to the Ethstats service.

Gas Price

Gas Price

Gas Price is the current price miners will accept for processing a transaction.

Ethstats Page Latency

Page Latency

The latency in time between a rendered Etherstats front-end dashboard (in your web browser) and it's backend data service.

Ethstatus Uptime

Uptime

The amount of time Etherstats has been running since started or re-started.

Geo Locations

Location of Ethereum nodes reporting to Etherstats.

Blocktime Chart

Blocktime averages over time.

Difficulty Chart

Difficulty over time.

Block Propagation

Block Propagation tracks the speed in which blocks are shared between nodes connected to Ethstats.

Ethereum Ethstats Last Block Miners

Last Blocks Miners

Nodes that found the most Block, not including Uncles.

Ethstats Uncle Count

Uncle Count

Uncle Count displays the number of Uncles generated. Each bar represents 25 blocks.

Ethstats Ethereum Transactions

Transactions

Displays the number of transactions included in the latest blocks.

Gas Spending

The amount of Gas spent on transactions in recent blocks.

Ethereum Ethstats Node Name

Node Name

Node Type

Type and architecture of connected Ethereum nodes. Common node types are Geth, Ethminer and Parity.

Node Latency

The latency in time between the reporting node and Ethstats.

Node Miner Hash Rate

The hash rate the node reporting to Ethstats.

Node Peers

Number of peers connected to a specific node.

Pending Transactions

Number of transaction pending for a specific node.

Node Last Block

The Last Bock a specific node is aware of.

Block Transactions

Number of transactions a blow is aware of and pending. These transactions will be added to the next block.

Node Uncles

Number of Uncles a node has reported creating.

Last Block Time

The last time a node was aware of a Block being created.

Propagation Time

How long block takes to propagate to a node over time.

Average Propagation Time

The average time it takes to propagate a block to this node.

Node Uptime

Node Uptime reports the percentage of time a node has reported as running since connected to Ethstats.

This blog post, titled: "Ethereum Ethstats: Learning the Ethereum Blockchain through its metrics." by Craig Johnston, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Creative Commons License

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