Use metrics to monitor performance

Quorum Blockchain Service (QBS) integrates with Azure Monitor to enable you to monitor resources for availability, performance, and operations.

In addition to the standard Azure metrics, QBS provides the following custom metrics for transaction nodes and validator nodes:

• qbs/performance
• qbs/connection
• qbs/blockchain

Access the metrics

To access the custom metrics for your validator node or transaction node:

1. Open your QBS member in the Azure Portal.

2. Select your managed resource group in the Overview tab.

   

3. In the working pane, select your transaction node or validator node.

   

4. In the resource menu's Monitoring section, select Metrics.

5. In the working pane, select the custom metrics in the Metric Namespace dropdown

   

Custom metrics types

Performance metrics

The following table lists the performance metrics that are collected for each of the nodes.

Metric name	Unit	Aggregation type	Description
CPU_Usage_percentage	Percentage	Max	Percentage of the CPU usage.
io_read_bytes	Kilobytes	Sum	Sum of IO read bytes across all nodes of the blockchain member resource.
io_write_bytes	Kilobytes	Sum	Sum of IO writes bytes across all nodes of the blockchain member resource.
Memory_Limit	Gigabytes	Average	Maximum memory available for the blockchain process per node.
Memory_Usage	Gigabytes	Average	Amount of memory used averaged across all nodes.
Memory_Usage_Percentage	Percentage	Average	Percentage of memory used averaged across all nodes.
Storage_Usage	Gigabytes	Average	Storage (in GB) used averaged across all nodes.

Connection metrics

The following table lists the different connection metrics that are collected for your nodes. These are Nginx proxy metrics.

Metric name	Unit	Aggregation type	Description
Accepted_Connections	Count	Sum	Total number of accepted client connections.
Active_Connections	Count	Average	Current number of active client connections including waiting connections.
Handled_Connections	Count	Sum	Total number of handled connections. Generally, the parameter value is the same as accepted connections unless some resource limits have been reached.
Handled_Requests	Count	Sum	Total number of client requests.

Blockchain metrics

The following table specifies the list of blockchain metrics that are collected for your nodes.

Metric name	Unit	Aggregation type	Description
Pending_Transactions	Count	Average	Number of transactions waiting to be mined.
Processed_Blocks	Count	Sum	Number of blocks processed in each time interval. The block size is 5 seconds, meaning in a minute each node processes 12 blocks.
Processed_Transactions	Count	Sum	Number of transactions processed in a block.
Queued_Transactions	Count	Average	Number of transactions that cannot be immediately mined. It can be because they arrived out of order and the future transaction is waiting for the previous one to arrive. Or, it can be because two transactions have the same number only used once (nonce) and the same gas value, hence the second one cannot be mined.

Create a metric chart

You can create custom metrics dashboards in the Azure portal to view the ongoing activity of your QBS member. The Azure Metrics Explorer documentation provides information about how to use the metrics to create a metric chart, and other advanced features.

Create alerts based on metrics

You can set custom alerts based on metrics of your QBS member. For example, if you want to be alerted when transactions are stuck in the queue, you can use Azure Metrics Alerts to determine what action you want taken.