If you’re a validator on Solana, you need alerting. You need to know when your validator becomes delinquent or when the cluster goes down and you need to take action. Here is a guide on how to set up effective, enterprise-level alerting all without spending a penny.
Install watchtower for validator or validators of interest. solana-watchtower comes bundled with every installation of Solana, so all you need to do is install the Solana CLI tools on whatever machine you want watchtower to run on. This does not need to be a very powerful machine, but bear in mind that you will want it to be running at all times.
For installing the Solana CLI tools, consult the Solana documentation.
PagerDuty has a paid tier, but for our purposes you can use the free tier.
Once signed up, navigate to “Integrations” and add the events2 API.
Locate your integration key.
Export the integration key in your watchtower script or service.
export PAGERDUTY_INTEGRATION_KEY=
Once the integration key has been added, restart watchtower.
For PagerDuty to be useful, you will need to install the app on your phone so you can get alerted.
Consult your phone’s app store.
Once installed, log in with the same credentials used earlier to create the integration key.
To ensure that you can still receive alerts from PagerDuty during DnD modes, make sure you configure your DnD settings to allow PagerDuty alerts to come through. An alerting app that gets blocked by DnD doesn’t do a whole lot of good in letting you know that your validator crashed.