Akash Discord Monitoring System: IBC, Chain & Endpoints

[napelvs]

Akash Discord Monitoring System: IBC, Chain & Endpoints

Motivation

Discord serves as a central hub for validator coordination, infrastructure management, and ecosystem communication—particularly crucial during chain instability, endpoint downtime, or IBC transfer issues.

Currently, Akash Discord benefits from Active Node's "Akash Status Bot", but lacks comprehensive monitoring across essential infrastructure components:

• Software upgrades
• RPC, REST, and gRPC endpoints
• IBC relaying infrastructure

Cosmonaut Stakes proposes an integrated monitoring suite addressing these gaps to significantly improve operational readiness, infrastructure reliability, and user experience.

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Challenges

Chain Status

Akash’s downtime during scheduled upgrades depends heavily on timely validator responses. The current Akash Status Bot lacks automated software upgrade countdown alerts, risking extended downtime, validator jailing, and slashing incidents.

Endpoint Reliability

Public endpoints (RPC, REST, gRPC) are vital yet lack automated monitoring and timely alerts. Existing monitoring via updown.io is inactive, leaving endpoint downtime unnoticed, negatively impacting explorers, wallets, and user experiences.

IBC Infrastructure

Relayers ensure IBC transfers remain seamless, yet there is no universal tool monitoring Akash’s IBC connections. Stuck packets, silent client expirations, and delayed transfers frequently occur unnoticed.

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Comprehensive Solution

Cosmonaut Stakes proposes integrating an advanced monitoring suite into Akash Discord, covering Chain Status, Endpoint Reliability, and IBC Infrastructure with specialized bots:

1. Chain Status Monitoring

• Software Upgrade Coordination: Timely upgrade countdowns (T-3h, T-1h, T-5min)
• Validator Monitoring & Alerts: Slashing risk, recovery, jail status, moniker/commission changes.
• Governance Participation Alerts: Proposals, voting outcomes, software upgrade proposals.
• User Insights via Commands: Validator status subscriptions, health checks, voting power info, etc.

The bot is currently live several Discord servers, including Secret Network (#node-alerts channel) and Provenance ('#mainnet-status' channel)

More details HERE.

2. Endpoint Monitoring

• Multi-Endpoint Monitoring: RPC, REST, gRPC monitoring with health, sync height, response times.
• Alerts and Recovery Notifications: Automated tagging for incident response.
• Custom Endpoint Support: Flexible monitoring setup.
• Command Suite: $addtag, $deltag, $displaytags, $addendpoint, $delendpoint, $display.

View screenshots and usage examples

3. IBC Monitoring

• Stuck Packet Detection: Real-time alerts for unrelayed packets, detailed contextual information.
• Client Expiration Alerts: Pre-expiration warnings.
• Relayer Notifications: Tagging system for relayers to manage alerts.
• Comprehensive Command Suite: Management commands for channels and relayers.

See screenshots and live examples here

Monitored IBC Paths

We propose monitoring the following active IBC paths:

1. Akash ↔ Osmosis
2. Akash ↔ Cosmos Hub
3. Akash ↔ Stargaze
4. Akash ↔ Kava
5. Akash ↔ Umee
6. Akash ↔ Archway
7. Akash ↔ Elys

These paths are chosen based on usage and volume (data from Mintscan).

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Budget Overview

Service	Monthly Cost	Annual Cost
Chain Status Bot	$250	$3,000
Endpoint Monitoring Bot	$200	$2,400
IBC Monitoring Bot	$500	$6,000
Subtotal		$11,400
Volatility Buffer	10%	$1,400
Total Request		$12,800

Costs cover hosting, infrastructure maintenance, node synchronization, ongoing updates, and full Discord integration.

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Community Feedback

We invite feedback from the Akash community—validators, infrastructure providers, relayers, and general community members—to gauge interest and utility for these monitoring solutions. This integrated proposal ensures that Akash’s infrastructure maintains peak reliability and performance, fostering a robust ecosystem.

The tools receiving strong community support will be included in a final on-chain proposal for integration.

[piber-dev]

hi @napelvs thanks for writing this! while i do like this idea, i do not like how you are proposing this to be funded. i'd much rather see a one-time cost and for this tool to become open-source and be hosted by OCL or another community member. i don't like the idea of this continuing to cost >$10k/year for a discord bot that might be valuable as a service but is not a hard system to create from scratch (with custom specs tailored to exactly what the community needs) or to maintain. i'd much rather see this continue as a small proposal or a bounty started through one of the SIG groups here such as the SIG-chain call on the 8th of july.

[brewsterdrinkwater]

@napelvs gave a demo of some of the work he has already done for discord monitoring systems.

Please feel free to watch the recording from sig-analytics quarterly call on July 2nd, 2025, found here.

[31trainman]

I wonder if chakra and blockworks ideas could be useful for this project?