Xatu

Ethereum network monitoring with collection clients and a centralized server for data pipelining.

Overview

Xatu can run in multiple modes. Each mode can be run independently. The following diagram shows the different modes and how they interact with each other and other services.

             ┌───────────┐
             │ CONSENSUS │
             │P2P NETWORK│
             └─────▲─────┘
                   │
      ┌────────────┘─────────────┐
      │                          │
┌─────▲─────┐              ┌─────▲─────┐       ┌───────────┐
│ CONSENSUS │              │ ARMIARMA  │       │ EXECUTION │
│   CLIENT  ◄─────┐        │           │       │P2P NETWORK│
└─────▲─────┘     │        └─────▲─────┘       └─────▲─────┘
      │           │              │             ┌─────┘───────┐
      │           │              │             │             │
  ┌───▼────┐ ┌────▼─────┐  ┌─────▼─────┐ ┌─────▼─────┐ ┌─────▼─────┐
  │  XATU  │ │   XATU   │  │   XATU    │ │   XATU    │ │   XATU    │
  │ SENTRY │ │  CANNON  │  │   SAGE    │ │  MIMICRY  │ │ DISCOVERY │
  └───┬────┘ └─────┬────┘  └─────┬─────┘ └─────┬─────┘ └─────┬─────┘
      │            │             │             │             │
      │            │             │             │             │
      │       ┌────▼─────┐       │             │             │
      └───────►          ◄───────┘─────────────┘─────────────┘
              │   XATU   │
              │  SERVER  │    ┌─────────────┐
              │          ◄────► PERSISTENCE │
              │          │    └─────────────┘
              └─────┬────┘
                    │
                    │
                    ▼
              DATA PIPELINE

Modes

Follow the links for more information on each mode.

• Server - Centralized server collecting events from various clients and can output them to various sinks.
• Sentry - Client that runs along side a Ethereum consensus client and collects data via the consensus client's Beacon API. You must run your own consensus client and this projects sentry will connect to it via the consensus client's http server.
• Discovery - Client that uses the Node Discovery Protocol v5 and Node Discovery Protocol v4 to discovery nodes on the network. Also attempts to connect to execution layer nodes and collect meta data from them.
• Mimicry - Client that collects data from the execution layer P2P network.
• Cannon - Client that runs along side a Ethereum consensus client and collects canonical finalized data via the consensus client's Beacon API. You must run your own consensus client and this projects cannon client will connect to it via the consensus client's http server.
• Sage - Client that connects to an Armiarma instance (which itself connects to an Ethereum Beacon Chain P2P network) and creates events from the events Armiarma emits.

Getting Started

Download a release

Download the latest release from the Releases page. Extract and run with:

./xatu <server|sentry|discovery|mimicry> --config your-config.yaml

Docker

Available as a docker image at ethpandaops/xatu

Images

• latest - distroless, multiarch
• latest-debian - debian, multiarch
• $version - distroless, multiarch, pinned to a release (i.e. 0.4.0)
• $version-debian - debian, multiarch, pinned to a release (i.e. 0.4.0-debian)

Kubernetes via Helm

Read more

helm repo add ethereum-helm-charts https://ethpandaops.github.io/ethereum-helm-charts

helm install xatu ethereum-helm-charts/xatu -f your_values.yaml

Locally via docker compose

docker compose up --detach

This will setup a pipeline to import events from Xatu server into a clickhouse instance. This will not run sentry/discovery/mimicry/cannon/sage clients but allow you run them locally and connect to the server.

There is also a grafana instance running with dashboards that can be used to visualize the data.

Exposed ports:

• 8080 - Xatu server
• 9000 - Clickhouse native port
• 8123 - Clickhouse http port
• 3000 - Grafana

Links:

• Clickhouse playground
• Grafana

Example sentry config to connect to the server:

logging: "info"
metricsAddr: ":9095"

name: example-instance

labels:
  ethpandaops: rocks

ntpServer: time.google.com

ethereum:
  # connect to your own consensus client
  beaconNodeAddress: http://localhost:5052

forkChoice:
  enabled: false

attestationData:
  enabled: false

beaconCommittees:
  enabled: false

outputs:
  - name: xatu
    type: xatu
    config:
      address: localhost:8080
      tls: false
      maxQueueSize: 51200
      batchTimeout: 5s
      exportTimeout: 30s
      maxExportBatchSize: 5
      connections: 3

Local clickhouse

You can start up the clickhouse cluster only with migrations automatically applied. You might want to do this to play with out Xatu data locally.

docker compose --profile clickhouse up --detach

Building xatu changes

When making changes to the xatu codebase, you can build the docker image with the following command:

docker compose up -d --build

Cleaning up docker volumes

We use docker volumes to store data between restarts. If you would like to clean up the volumes, you can do so with the following command:

docker compose down -v

Contributing

Contributions are greatly appreciated! Pull requests will be reviewed and merged promptly if you're interested in improving Xatu!

1. Fork the project
2. Create your feature branch:
   • git checkout -b feat/new-output
3. Commit your changes:
   • git commit -m 'feat(sentry): new output
4. Push to the branch: -git push origin feat/new-output
5. Open a pull request

Contact

Sam - @samcmau

Andrew - @savid