Chia Farming Dashboard

Overview

I use Ubuntu server for running Chia on all of my farmers and harvesters, and I don’t have a need or desire to run the Chia GUI. A dashboard can help you see the status and health of your farm at a glance. My go-to combination for monitoring general system information, like CPU usage, disk stats, temperature, and power, is node-exporter and Prometheus. The Chia dashboard uses a combination of chia-exporter, which will export data to Prometheus. If all of this is confusing, don’t worry, we will have some basic things you can copy and paste to get to work. Linux is great because there are a million ways to do everything, but in this case with Prometheus, finding information online about how to run was very challenging for me when I was just getting started in Linux.

Tools

• Chia Exporter – this comes directly from Chia, so no 3rd party monitoring scripts are required
• Node Exporter – this is what we will use for a general dashboard for monitoring
• Prometheus – the database / data source where this is all stored so you can see the stats over time
• Grafana – this is for hosting the dashboards
• Docker – this makes running the above extremely easy, and is my preferred method

Monitoring

Node-exporter will be used to monitor CPU utilization, disk io and latency, system power, temperatures, and much more.

Chia-exporter will monitor the full node to ensure it is synced, with things like Netspace and block validation time, mempool fees, and more information about the full node. The wallet can monitor the balance of multiple wallets. The harvester and farmer section can monitor the number of plots, harvester latency (which is critical for farming and even more for compressed plots), and plots passing the filter.

Installation

Install Chia-Exporter

https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-exporter

Copy paste these into your Ubuntu command line

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
curl -sL https://repo.chia.net/FD39E6D3.pubkey.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/chia.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/chia.gpg] https://repo.chia.net/chia-exporter/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chia-exporter.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chia-exporter

We are going to create a basic service so it will start automatically (change your user)

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/chia-exporter.service

[Unit]
Description=Chia Exporter Service
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/chia-exporter serve
User=jm
Group=jm
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now hit CTRL+O to save, then CTRL-X to exit nano

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable chia-exporter.service
sudo systemctl start chia-exporter.service
sudo systemctl status chia-exporter.service

You are now running Chia Exporter! You will need this running on all your farmers and harvester.

Install Docker

You can either install docker through snap, apt or the method I use is directly from Docker for Ubuntu

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

# Add Docker's official GPG key:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg

# Add the repository to Apt sources:
echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Exit your ssh, and enter back in for the user permissions to take effect

Create compose.yml and prometheus.yml

Next we are going create the compose.yml for docker, and prometheus.yml

nano compose.yml

version: '3.8'

services:
  node-exporter:
    image: prom/node-exporter:latest
    container_name: node-exporter
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 9100:9100
    volumes:
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - /sys:/host/sys:ro
      - /:/rootfs:ro
    command:
      - "--path.procfs=/host/proc"
      - "--path.sysfs=/host/sys"
      - "--path.rootfs=/rootfs"
      - "--collector.filesystem.ignored-mount-points='^/(sys|proc|dev|host|etc|rootfs/var/lib/docker/containers|rootfs/var/lib/docker/overlay2|rootfs/run/docker/netns|rootfs/var/lib/docker/aufs)($$|/)'"
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    container_name: prometheus
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
      - prometheus_storage:/prometheus
    command:
      - '--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml'
    ports:
      - 9090:9090
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana-oss:latest
    container_name: grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    volumes:
      - grafana_storage:/var/lib/grafana
volumes:
    prometheus_storage:
    grafana_storage:

Now hit CTRL+O to save, then CTRL-X to exit nano

nano prometheus.yml

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: "prometheus"
    scrape_interval: 15s
    static_configs:
    - targets: ["localhost:9090"]

  - job_name: "node"
    static_configs:
    - targets: ["node-exporter:9100"]

  - job_name: "chia-exporter"
    static_configs:
    - targets: ["192.168.0.101:9914"]
      labels:
        application: 'chia-blockchain'
        network: 'mainnet'

Starting everything up

Run your compose file

docker compose up -d

Log into Grafana

Open a browser

navigate to IP address:3000, e.g. 192.168.0.101:3000

Default name and password are

admin admin

Click on add data source

Click on prometheus

Add the url

http://192.168.0.101:9090

(your IP address of the system you are running Prometheus on)

Then click save and test

add dashboard

Type in 1860 (which is node exporter)

Select Prometheus data source

Ensure that is all working

Add new dashboard for Chia Farming, exactly like above

https://grafana.com/orgs/chianetwork/dashboards

import number 17939

Win! You now have a serious hardcore farming dashboard