How to monitor the Bitcoin blockchain

A lot of people ask about how to monitor the Bitcoin blockchain for security reasons. Depending on the purpose of your monitoring, you will likely need to run one or more Bitcoin full nodes in addition to your monitoring infrastructure. A typical blockchain network includes a set of interconnected nodes that act as peers. These nodes are generally hosted in local infrastructure, configured natively on a physical machine, or using containerization and virtualization technologies such as Docker and VMware.

Transactions submitted to the Bitcoin network are broadcast to all peers, and newly created blocks are propagated so that all peers have an updated copy of the shared ledger. To better understand the block, its transaction-related events, and associated metadata, we monitor all of our connected peers. To do this, generally use a block browser, which listens for events and provides a visualization of the number of transactions received, processed, and finally grouped in a new block. However, this level of monitoring does not give any indication of the use of resources on this node, the integrity of other nodes, or the latency encountered within the Bitcoin network.

Effective monitoring and management of a blockchain network require a framework capable of integrating data, digesting the events generated, and providing efficient visualization of blockchain arrays. This infrastructure must be modular and support deployment topologies, allowing monitoring on an individual node and across the entire Bitcoin blockchain network.