Monitor Your Node

The beaconcha.in Web Site and Mobile App

As a node operator, it is crucial to monitor the health and performance of your validators. This involves maintaining high uptime and ensuring the timely and accurate production of attestations and proposals. Monitoring your node is essential to ensure continuous rewards and to avoid penalties for inactivity or inefficiency.

beaconcha.in is an open source Ethereum Beacon Chain explorer that provides valuable information about the real-time activities of the Beacon Chain as a whole, as well as specific details about your validators.

One of the key features of beaconcha.in is the ability to set up push notifications. These notifications alert you to important validator events, such as missed attestations or assignment of proposal duties. By staying on top of these activities, you can maintain the active status of your validators and avoid any potential disruptions.

Navigating to your Validator Page on beaconcha.in

You can navigator to your Validator Page by various means:

From the Main page of your Consensus Client on AVADO:
- Click the link to "Beacon Chain Validator Dashboard" (the green banner A in the figure below). This brings you to the Dashboard page on beaconcha.in, which shows a summary view and the total rewards across all of your validators. You can then click the Public Key link of individual validators to enter their respective Validator page.
- Click the the "beacon" icon, or the Index or Public Key links for individual validators (B, C and D in the figure). They all bring you to your individual Validator page on beaconcha.in.

More directly, visit the beaconcha.in web site:
- On the top of the screen, locate the search field which says "Public Key / Block Number / Block Hash ...". Enter your validator Index, or paste in your validator pub key. Wait a second for a drop-down box to show, then select the matching "Validator" entry in the list.
- Once your Validator Page shows, bookmark it on your browser so you can return to this page quickly.

Understanding your Validator Page

Your Validator Page on beaconcha.in provides a wealth of information about your validator. Here is a quick walkthrough using an example validator (index 1234567):

A. Status

In normal operations, your validator's status shall stay as green Active. This means you validator is producing attestations. If you validator has missed attestations for two or more epochs, the Active icon will turn red.

B. Validator Stats

Rank. Your validator's standing among all validators, ranked by 7-day income.
Status. Green Active is good, red is not good.
Balance and Effective Balance. Balance is your current balance on the validator. Amount above 32 ETH will be periodically "skimmed" to your Withdrawal Address. Effective Balance is the basis to calculate the the rewards of your validator. It is capped at 32 ETH but can be reduced if your balance falls below 32 ETH.
Effectiveness. The Attestation Inclusion Effectiveness by definition is a measure of how timely your validator's attestations are included in a block. As a prerequisite, the attestations need to be produced in the first place, and are correct, in order to have a chance of being included, and ideally the attestations shall be included as early as possible, i.e. with a zero "inclusion distance". The effectiveness should be 80% or higher (ideally 95% or above) to minimize reward penalties.

Factors affecting Effectiveness

The Effectiveness is a combined measure of your validator's online presence, correctness, and timeliness, averaged across a recent time period.

If your validators have been offline, the Effectiveness will drop.

If your validators are consistently attesting but demonstrating low Effectiveness, it is often due to larger than usual "inclusion distances". This is an indication of poor peer connectivity. To improve this situation, you may want to consider Opening Network Ports on your Router. This can help enhance the connectivity and communication between your validators and the network, potentially leading to improved attestation effectiveness.

C. More validator stats

Blocks. Number of blocks proposed, and as a percentage of blocks assigned.
Attestations. Number of attestations produced, and as a percentage of attestation slots assigned.
Sync Committee. Number of participations in Sync Committees. See Rewards and Penalties for more details. This is a relatively rare event.
Slashing. The blocks produced by your validator may contain evidence that other validators have committed a slashable offense. This number represents the count of validator slashings that have been included in the blocks produced by your validator. This is an even rarer event.
Deposits. Number of deposits made to the deposit contract. For Solo Stakers, most likely there was only one deposit of 32 ETH. For Rocketpool and Stader stakers, the respective smart contracts may have made multiple deposits to make up the 32 ETH stake.
Withdrawals. Number of withdrawals processed for this validator, i.e. the number of times you have received payout to your Withdrawal Address.

D. Tabs to show detailed information

Charts

The Income chart shows the daily income. Green bar is execution income (tips and MEV-Boost rewards when your validator propose a block). Blue bar is consensus income (attestation fees, etc., that your validator receives every epoch). Orange bar means penalties (negative income). The Proposals chart shows the number of proposals made or missed on a timeline.

Blocks

This shows a history of blocks proposed by your validator, with details on epoch, slot, time, and some other stats.

Attestations

This shows a history of attestations submitted by your validator. Green Attested status is good, red Missed status is bad. Also note the "Incl. Slot" and "Opt. Incl. Dist." columns. The Inclusion Slot is the slot in which your attestation was included in a block. Typically, this is the immediate slot after your attestation was produced; but occasionally, if other validators miss a block, your attestation could be included in a later slot. It is ideal for the Optimal Inclusion Distance to consistently be zero, indicating that your attestations are included as early as possible. Late inclusions can have a negative impact on your rewards and reduce your Attestation Inclusion Effectiveness.

Slots and Epochs in Ethereum

A Slot is a time period of 12 seconds in which a randomly chosen validator has time to propose a block.

1 Epoch = 32 Slots, and takes approximately 6.4 minutes.

Each of your validators has exactly one assignment to produce an attestation within the period of one epoch. Your validators' performance, including their attestation effectiveness and rewards, is evaluated every epoch.

Sync Committee

This shows a history of Sync Committee participation.

Sync Committees

A Sync Committee is a group of 512 validators, randomly assigned by the Ethereum 2.0 network. A new committee is chosen every 256 epochs, roughly 27 hours. This committee continually signs block headers for each new slot in the beacon chain.

Slasher

This shows a history of Slashing events included in blocks produced by your validator. Note that this refers to slashing of other validators (based on proofs included in the blocks your validator produced), not slashing of your own.

Deposits

If you have set a Withdrawal Address, the withdrawal credentials will begin with 0x01. Clicking on the link will bring you to your Withdrawal Address. A value that starts with 0x00 means you have not set the Withdrawal Address. The Execution Layer and Consensus Layer sections display when your deposit(s) were made and when they were recognized by the Beacon Chain.

Withdrawals

The history of all withdrawals, and the expected timing of the next withdrawal. If you have set a Withdrawal Address, your Consensus Layer rewards accrued above 32 ETH will be periodically "skimmed" and sent to the Withdrawal Address. This is known as partial withdrawals. Eventually when you decide to exit the validator, the final balance including the 32 ETH stake and accrued rewards will also be sent to the Withdrawal Address. This is known as full withdrawal.

The "Recipient Address" column on this tab really means the Withdrawal Address (not to be confused with the Fee Recipient Address).

E. General Rewards Data

Total Rewards. The total rewards earned by your validator since its activation. If you hover over the number, it will also show you a breakdown of the Consensus Layer (CL) and Execution Layer (EL) rewards.

Income Today / 1d / 7d / 31d. The rewards earned in the respective time periods. Again a breakdown of CL and EL rewards is available by hovering over the numbers.
APR 7d / 31d / 365d. The annualized percentage return calculated for the respective time periods, with a breakdown into CL and EL components.
Luck. This is a measure of how "lucky" your validator is, compared to statistically how likely a validator should get a proposal (or a Sync Committee assignment). Hovering over the number gives you a quick idea of statistically how likely (or how infrequently!) you would expect to get a block proposal or a Sync Committee assignment.

F. Validator History

The Validator History panel shows the actual rewards (in GWei) earned by the validator for each attestation.

You may observe that each attestation can earn a varying amount of rewards due to the following factors:
- Firstly, the reward is influenced by the number of active validators in the network during a specific epoch.
- Secondly, your validator's reward is determined based on the accuracy of its vote on the Source, Target, and Head blocks, according to its view of the blockchain. By hovering over the number, you can see the breakdown of rewards for each vote, where positive values indicate correctness and negative values represent penalties for incorrect votes. It may occur that your validator did not miss the attestation, but the votes are incorrect, resulting in an overall penalty.
- Additionally, the reward is adjusted based on the timeliness of your validator's vote inclusion and the Effective Balance of your validator.

An attestation consists of three votes, in simplified terms:

Source: what your validator thinks is the first block of the previous epoch;

Target: what your validator thinks is the first block of the current epoch;

Head: what your validator thinks is the head block of the blockchain.

Subscribing to Notifications

To sign up for Notifications, you will need to create an account on beaconcha.in. Click Sign Up on the top banner. You will need to provide an email address (consider using a separate or disposable email address if you are concerned about privacy).

Click Notifications (and log in as required) to go to the Notifications Center. You will be greeted with some statistics.

Click Notification Channels to select your preferred channels. Download the beaconchain mobile app (link) to your phone to receive Push Notification.

Further down, there are two panels on Node and Network Monitoring. For most AVADO users, these are not necessary. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the Validators panel.

This is where you can add your validator(s) to the watchlist. Click Add validator and key in your validator indices, and choose the types of alerts you wish to subscribe to (or choose them all).

That's it! From now on, you will receive timely alerts for missed attestations or when your validator successfully proposes a block, and so on. This will help you stay informed and updated on the performance of your validator.

Here is an example of the push notifications received on a phone:

The push notifications help you manage your validators "by exception", meaning, you do not need to constantly watch your validators by connecting to your AVADO machine. You only need to access the dashboard on the AVADO, or examine the Logs, when you have been notified of a potential problem.