sentinel-visor

README

Sentinel Visor

A component of Sentinel, a collection of services which monitor the health and function of the Filecoin network.

A Visor process collects permanent Filecoin chain meterics from a Lotus daemon, and writes them to a TimescaleDB time-series and relational datastore.

Getting Started

Clone the repo and build the dependencies:

$ git clone git@github.com:filecoin-project/sentinel-visor.git
$ cd sentinel-visor
$ make deps

Build the visor binary to the root of the project directory:

$ make build

Building on M1-based Macs

Because of the novel architecture of the M1-based Mac computers, some specific environment variables must be set before creating the visor executable.

Create necessary environment variable to allow Visor to run on ARM architecture:

export GOARCH=arm64
export CGO_ENABLED=1
export LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/homebrew/lib
export FFI_BUILD_FROM_SOURCE=1

Now, build the visor binary to the root of the project directory:

$ make build

Install TimescaleDB v1.7.4:

In a separate shell, use docker-compose to start the appropriate version of Postgres with TimescaleDB. (Note: Visor requires TimescaleDB v1.7.x and will not work with v2.0.)

docker-compose up --build timescaledb

Running tests

To quickly run tests, you can provide the VISOR_TEST_DB envvar and execute make test like so:

VISOR_TEST_DB="postgres://postgres:password@localhost:5432/postgres?sslmode=disable" make test

For more, manual test running, you could also prepare your environment in the following way:

Create a new DB in postgres for testing:

CREATE DATABASE visor_test;

Migrate the database to the latest schema:

visor --db "postgres://username@localhost/visor_test?sslmode=disable" migrate --latest

Run the tests:

VISOR_TEST_DB="postgres://username@localhost/visor_test?sslmode=disable" go test ./...

Usage

  sentinel-visor [<flags>] <command>

  Use 'sentinel-visor help <command>' to learn more about each command.

Use the following env vars to configure the lotus node that visor reads from, and the database that it writes to:

• LOTUS_PATH - path to the lotus data dir. default: ~/.lotus
• LOTUS_DB - database connection . default: postgres://postgres:password@localhost:5432/postgres?sslmode=disable

The walk and watch commands expect a list of tasks to be provided. Each task is responsible for reading a particular type of data from the chain and persisting it to the database. The mapping between available tasks and database tables is as follows:

Task Name	Database Tables
blocks	block_headers, block_parents, drand_block_entries
messages	messages, receipts, block_messages, parsed_messages, derived_gas_outputs, message_gas_economy
chaineconomics	chain_economics
actorstatesraw	actors, actor_states
actorstatespower	chain_powers, power_actor_claims
actorstatesreward	chain_rewards
actorstatesminer	miner_current_deadline_infos, miner_fee_debts, miner_locked_funds, miner_infos, miner_sector_posts, miner_pre_commit_infos, miner_sector_infos, miner_sector_events, miner_sector_deals
actorstatesinit	id_addresses
actorstatesmarket	market_deal_proposals, market_deal_states
actorstatesmultisig	multisig_transactions

Configuring Tracing

The global flag --tracing=<bool> turns tracing on or off. It is on by default.

Tracing expects a Jaeger server to be available. Configure the Jaeger settings using the following subset of the standard Jaeger environment variables:

• JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME - name of the service (defaults to sentinel-visor).
• JAEGER_AGENT_HOST - hostname for communicating with Jaeger agent via UDP (defaults to localhost).
• JAEGER_AGENT_PORT - port for communicating with Jaeger agent via UDP (defaults to 6831).
• JAEGER_SAMPLER_TYPE - type of sampling to use, either probabilistic or const (defaults to probabilistic).
• JAEGER_SAMPLER_PARAM - numeric parameter used to configure the sampler type (defaults to 0.0001).

These variables may also be set using equivalent cli flags.

By default visor uses probabilistic sampling with a rate of 0.0001. During testing it can be easier to override to remove sampling by setting the following environment variables:

  JAEGER_SAMPLER_TYPE=const JAEGER_SAMPLER_PARAM=1

or by specifying the following flags:

  --jaeger-sampler-type=const jaeger-sampler-param=1

Versioning and Releases

Feature branches and master are designated as unstable which are internal-only development builds.

Periodically a build will be designated as stable and will be assigned a version number by tagging the repository using Semantic Versioning in the following format: vMajor.Minor.Patch.

Other Topics

• Release Management
• Schema/Migration Management

Code of Conduct

Sentinel Visor follows the Filecoin Project Code of Conduct. Before contributing, please acquaint yourself with our social courtesies and expectations.

Contributing

Welcoming new issues and pull requests.

License

The Filecoin Project and Sentinel Visor is dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 and MIT terms:

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)