Monitor

!!! warning This is not a complete recipe - it's a component of the cryptominer "uber-recipe", but has been split into its own page to reduce complexity.

So, you're a miner! But if you're not actively mining, are you still a miner? This page details how to measure your mining activity, and how to raise an alert when a profit-affecting issue affects your miners.

Ingredients

InfluxDB+Grafana instance, for visualising data
Icinga, Nagios etc for alarming on GPU/miner status
Asi MPM (iOS) for monitoring your miner/pool status
Altpocket, CoinTracking, etc for managing your crypto-asset portfolio (referral links)

Preparation

Visualising performance

Since Minerhotel switches currency based on what's most profitable in the moment, it's hard to gauge the impact of changes (overclocking, tweaking, mining pools) over time.

I hacked up a bash script which grabs performance data from the output of the miners, and throws it into an InfluxDB database, which can then be visualized using Grafana.

Here's an early version of the script (it's since been updated for clockspeed and power usage too):

!!! tip I share (with my patreon patrons) a private "premix" git repository, which includes up-to-date versions of the InfluxDB /Grafana script mentioned above, as well as pre-setup Grafana graphs, so that patrons can simply "git pull" and start monitoring 👍

Alarming on failure

GPU mining can fail in subtle ways. On occasion, I've tweaked my GPUs to the point that the miner will start, but one or all GPUs will report a zero hash rate. I wanted to be alerted to such profit-affecting issues, so I wrote a bash script (intended to be executed by NRPE from Icinga, Nagios, etc).

The script tests the output of the currently active miner, and ensures the GPUs have a valid hashrate.

!!! tip I share (with my patreon patrons) a private "premix" git repository, which includes up-to-date versions of the Icinga scripts mentioned above, so that patrons can simply "git pull" and start monitoring 👍

Monitoring pool/miner status

I've tried several iOS apps for monitoring my performance across various. The most useful app I've found thus far is Asi MPM. It requires a little upfront effort to configure for all your coins/pools, but thereafter it's a handy way to keep tabs on your new obsession!

Track your portfolio

Now that you've got your coins happily cha-chinging into you wallets (and potentially various exchanges), you'll want to monitor the performance of your portfolio over time.

There's a detailed breakdown of porfolio-management apps here.

Personally, I use:

Altpocket (A free web app which can auto-sync with certain exchanges and wallets)
CoinTracking - The top crypto-portfolio manager, by far. But it's expensive when you get to > 200 trades. You get what you pay for ;)

!!! note Both of the links above are referral links. I get some goodies when you use them.

Continue your adventure

Now, continue to the next stage of your grand mining adventure:

Build your mining rig 💻
Setup your AMD or Nvidia GPUs 🎨
Setup your miners with Miner Hotel 🏨
Send your coins to exchanges or wallets 💹
Monitor your empire 💓 (this page)
Profit! 💰

Chef's Notes

Ultimately I hope to move all the configuration / mining executables into docker containers, but for now, they're running on a CentOS7 host for direct access to GPUs. (Apparently it may be possible to pass-thru the GPUs to docker containers, but I wanted stability first, before abstracting my hardware away from my miners)

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