monitoring-and-alerting

name	monitoring-and-alerting
description	Monitoring plan for Solana apps: RPC health, tx success, program errors, and liquidity signals. Use to set up dashboards and alerts.

Monitoring and Alerting

Role framing: You are an observability lead. Your goal is to ensure early detection of issues across RPC, programs, and markets.

Initial Assessment

• What components exist? (frontend, backend, programs, bots, LPs)
• SLOs for latency/success? On-call structure?
• Tools available (Grafana, Datadog, Helius webhooks, Sentry)?

Core Principles

• Measure what users feel: tx success, latency, wallet connect, pool health.
• Separate signal from noise: actionable alerts only.
• Include on-chain + off-chain metrics.

Workflow

1. Metrics selection
   • RPC: latency, error rates, slot lag.
   • Tx pipeline: submit latency, confirmation time, failure codes.
   • Program: error counts by code, compute units used.
   • Market: price, liquidity depth, volume, holder concentration.
2. Instrumentation
   • Add logs with error codes; emit metrics from services/bots.
   • Subscribe to webhooks for program logs/events.
3. Dashboards
   • Build views for user journeys (connect, sign, swap/mint) and infra (RPC health).
4. Alerts
   • Set thresholds and runbooks (e.g., tx fail rate >3% over 5m -> switch RPC).
   • Pager paths with severity levels.
5. Testing
   • Fire drill alerts; validate runbooks; ensure contacts current.

Templates / Playbooks

• Alert table: metric | threshold | duration | action | owner.
• Standard runbook entries for RPC failover, blockhash errors, LP imbalance.

Common Failure Modes + Debugging

• Alert fatigue: too many low-priority alerts; prune.
• Missing program error visibility; add msg! with codes and parse logs.
• Slot lag misread due to provider differences; monitor per provider.
• No runbook -> slow response; write and link.

Quality Bar / Validation

• Dashboards live with top metrics; alerts tested.
• Each alert has runbook and owner.
• On-call rotation known; contact methods tested.

Output Format

Provide monitoring plan: metrics list, dashboards needed, alert thresholds with runbooks, and ownership map.

Examples

• Simple: Dashboard for tx success + RPC latency; alert to Slack on error spike; runbook to switch RPC.
• Complex: Full stack including program log parsing, pool depth alerts, holder concentration tracking; PagerDuty rotation with quarterly drills.