Home < Bitcoin Core Dev Tech < Bitcoin Core Dev Tech 2024 (Apr) < P2P Monitoring

P2P Monitoring

Date: April 9, 2024

Tags: Bitcoin core, P2p, Developer tools

Category: Core dev tech

Slides

  • Started working on this about 2 years ago; in 2021. After we accidentally observed the address flooding anomaly/attack
  • Primarily uses https://github.com/0xB10C/peer-observer to extract data from Bitcoin Core nodes with tracepoints.
  • The infrastructure also includes a fork-observer connected to each node as well as an addrman-observer for each node. Additionally, detailed Bitcoin Core debug logs are avaliable. The main part are the Grafana dashboards.
  • There’s a public version at public.peer.observer, which is redacted to not leak honeynode IP addresses. Happy to provide access to an internal version.
  • Grafana dashboard shown, for example:
    • in and outbound P2P messages per node
      • observed drop in inbound version coming in when linking lion was down
    • current inbound connections
    • block connection duration
    • transaction rejected from mempool
  • More automated alerting and anomaly detection is a todo.