Photo by Zoltan Tukacs on Unsplash

Watchdog for your Chia farm

So you've become a Chia farmer and want to maximize the probability of getting a reward? Chiadog helps with automated monitoring and sends you a mobile notification in case something appears to malfunction.

Supported Notifications

Subsystem	Notification (example values)	Priority
Harvester	Your harvester appears to be offline! No events for the past 400 seconds.	HIGH
Harvester	Disconnected HDD? The total plot count decreased from 100 to 40.	HIGH
Harvester	Experiencing networking issues? Harvester did not participate in any challenge for 120 seconds. It's now working again.	NORMAL
Harvester	Seeking plots took too long: 40 seconds!	NORMAL
Harvester	Found 1 proof(s)!	LOW
Full Node	Experiencing networking issues? Skipped some signage points! Last 12/64, current 43/64.	NORMAL

How it works?

It parses the debug.log generated by the chia process and runs various checks to determine the health of your farmer. Among others, it can detect if your node has lost sync and the farmer is no longer participating in challenges, or if one of your external HDDs disconnected and your harvester doesn't have access to the full amount of plots you have.

Supported Integrations for Notifications

Pushover

Pushover is available for both Android and iOS. High priority notifications can be configured from the Pushover app to overwrite any Silence or Do-Not-Disturb modes on your phone and sound a loud alarm at any time of the day to make you aware of any issues in a timely manner.

Slack, WhatsApp, E-Mail, ...?

These integrations can be easily added. Contributions are welcome!

Getting started

Pre-requisites

UNIX-based OS (Linux/Mac) - contributions to support Windows are welcome!
Python 3.7+
Enabled INFO logs on your chia farmer

How to enable INFO logs on chia farmer?

First configure the log level to INFO. This ensures that all logs necessary for chiadog to operate are available under ~/.chia/mainnet/log/debug.log.

chia configure -log-level=INFO

Then restart your farmer to apply the changes:

chia start --restart farmer

Check that logs are coming in:

cat ~/.chia/mainnet/log/debug.log

Installation

For updating from previous version, see section below.

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/martomi/chiadog.git
cd chiadog

Create virtual env (Recommended)

python3 -m venv venv
. ./venv/bin/activate

Install the dependencies:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Copy the example config file

cp config-example.yaml config.yaml

Open up config.yaml in your editor and configure Pushover.
- Enable Pushover Notifier
- Set your Pushover API token
- Set your Pushover user key

Updating to the latest release

Skip this if you followed above section.

cd chiadog
. ./venv/bin/activate

git fetch
git checkout main
git pull

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Important: Automated migration of config is not supported. Please check that your config.yaml has all new fields introduced in config-example.yaml and add anything missing.

Monitoring a local harvester / farmer

Open config.yaml and configure file_log_consumer:
- You need to enable the file log consumer to read local chia log files
- Double-check that the path to your chia logs is correct
Start the watchdog

python3 main.py --config config.yaml

Verify that your plots are detected. Within a few seconds you should see INFO log:

Detected new plots. Farming with 42 plots.

Remote monitoring of multiple harvesters

You can run multiple instances of chiadog on a single machine and monitor all your harvesters remotely. The logs on remote machines are accessed through SSH, so you'll have to setup ssh-key based authentication with your harvesters.

Setting up SSH keys

This step only takes a minute, follow Github's guide on Generating a new SSH key . If you specify password for your key, you'll also need to follow the second step in the guide and add your SSH key to the ssh-agent. The ssh-agent should remember and manage your password because chiadog doesn't know it.

Copy SSH key to all machines running a harvester

On Linux you can use ssh-copy-id:

ssh-copy-id <user>@<ip_address>

which will take your default SSH key, or specify it explicitly:

ssh-copy-id -i "~/.ssh/id_ed25519" <user>@<ip_address>

Prepare configs for each harvester

Open config.yaml in your editor and enablenetwork_log_consumer.
- Make sure that file_log_consumer is disabled (or delete that section)
- Configure remote_user for your remote harvester machine
- Configure remote_host for your remote harvester machine
- Double check that remote_file_path exists on the remote machine
Copy config.yaml into multiple configs for each remote harvester, e.g.:

cp config.yaml config-harvester-1.yaml
cp config.yaml config-harvester-2.yaml
cp config.yaml config-harvester-3.yaml

Adjust the remote_user and remote_host for each machine.
- You can also specify different notification_title_prefix so that you can more easily distinguish between notification from each of your harvesters.
Start chiadog for each harvester in a separate terminal. I recommend tmux as it allows you to split your terminal in multiple windows and have a cockpit-like overview.

python3 main.py --config config-harvester-1.yaml
python3 main.py --config config-harvester-2.yaml
python3 main.py --config config-harvester-3.yaml

Troubleshooting

The best way to check that everything works on your system is to run the unit tests:

PUSHOVER_API_TOKEN=<your_token> PUSHOVER_USER_KEY=<your_key> python3 -m unittest

If your Pushover API token and user key are correctly set in the snippet above, you should receive notifications on your phone and the tests should complete with an OK status:

You can also enable more verbose logging from config.yaml by changing INFO to DEBUG. Then you'll be able to see logs for every keep-alive event from the harvester.

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome! Please refer to CONTRIBUTING documentation.

MiguelCarranza / chiadog