Why does monitoring matter for a Solana production deployment? When your app is on mainnet, small RPC delays, node errors, or on-chain anomalies can cascade into user-facing outages and compliance gaps.
What you'll learn: This lesson walks through practical monitoring and compliance checks you can apply to a Solana mainnet deployment. You'll learn which telemetry to collect (on-chain signals like slot progress and confirmed transaction counts, and off-chain signals like RPC latency, error rates, CPU and disk I/O), how to combine those signals into meaningful alerts, and how monitoring strategies change with different network-selection choices (multiple public RPCs with failover versus a single dedicated provider). The hands-on component guides you to produce a Prometheus scrape configuration, a small read-only health-check script that exposes Prometheus-format metrics, and two example alerting rules with justified thresholds. You will also create a short comparison of monitoring approaches by cost, coverage, and operational overhead and define an escalation path and incident reporting checklist.
Who this is for: Intermediate Solana developers and operators who have already chosen RPC endpoints and understand basic network-selection tradeoffs. Prior familiarity with RPC concepts and basic observability tools (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent) is recommended.
Key topics covered:
- Differentiating on-chain signals (slot lag, block production rate, confirmed transaction counts) and off-chain signals (RPC latency, timeouts, rate limits, instance CPU/disk I/O)
- Designing telemetry: which metrics to collect from RPC endpoints and exporter patterns
- Implementing a minimal read-only health-check that exposes Prometheus metrics
- Example Prometheus scrape configuration and alert rules with threshold justification
- Comparing monitoring approaches: self-hosted Prometheus + Grafana, managed observability, and RPC-provider alerts by cost, coverage, and operational overhead
- Escalation paths and a one-page incident reporting checklist for mainnet issues
Hands-on work is read-only: you will not sign transactions or move funds. Build artifacts include a scrape config, a health-check metrics endpoint, and a one-page comparison table to feed into your deployment readiness checklist.