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Introducing Splunk App for Hyperledger Fabric

Splunk By Splunk July 31, 2019

Blockchain is a new, complementary piece of enterprise infrastructure, and just like any infrastructure it has the same elements of performance, security and stability. Organizations will need to come up with a plan to monitor performance, security and stability. Splunk makes it easy to do just that, not just with blockchain but with the rest of the enterprise infrastructure. This is absolutely necessary for getting to production and also makes application development faster.  

We are pleased to unveil the new Splunk App for Hyperledger Fabric. This App gives you insight into your blockchain infrastructures built on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric. You can download the app from Splunkbase here. With the new Splunk App for Hyperledger Fabric, you will get the building blocks and dashboards necessary to obtain visibility and monitoring of Hyperledger Fabric node application logs, metrics and transaction data from the distributed ledger itself! Watch a demo video here.

The home screen for Splunk App for Hyperledger Fabric

 

Analyze and Monitor Hyperledger Fabric Application Logs

One of the first steps to gaining visibility and being able to troubleshoot any environment is being able to monitor and explore logs coming from the applications themselves. Each Hyperledger Fabric component plays a different role and sends out different formats of logs. The good news is Splunk can extract values from any format on the fly giving you the instant ability to find keywords, errors and patterns at ease.

The Splunk search interface exploring Hyperledger LFabric logs

 

Analyze and Monitor Hyperledger Fabric Metrics

Adding application and system performance metrics in addition to the logs from Hyperledger Fabric nodes can provide even more visibility into your environment. Chaincode, consensus and block performance and latency are just a few of the critical metrics that can help you gain insight into blockchain performance. For a full reference of what is available check out the Hyperledger Fabric Metrics Reference. Note these metrics are available for Hyperledger Fabric 1.4 and later.

The Splunk App for Hyperledger Fabric comes with some example dashboards, but you also can use the Metrics workspace to explore and build your own!

Both system-level and application metrics in the Infrastructure Health dashboard

 


 

Metrics Workspace exploring Hyperledger Fabric metrics from StatsD

 

 

Analyze and Monitor your Docker and Kubernetes system metrics

Where are those system-level metrics coming from? Whether it’s in the cloud, on-prem, using Docker or Kubernetes, Splunk can ingest and analyze these metrics to gain insight about infrastructure powering your Hyperledger Fabric deployment. This is another critical component to the health and performance of an environment. In the example below we are ingesting metrics for Kubernetes. 

Kubernetes Monitoring dashboard with drilldowns

 

Gain transaction performance and business insights from the Hyperledger Fabric ledger

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to analyze the data on the ledger itself? And even more importantly be able to compare and correlate transaction analytics with your application and system logs and metrics? Using the Splunk Connect for Hyperledger Fabric, you can connect to a peer on the network and send blockchain transactions into Splunk. The Splunk App for Hyperledger Fabric provides searches and dashboards bringing all of this data together in one place allowing you to monitor and answer questions such as:

  1. Why are transactions slower coming from Organization A vs Organization B?  
  2. Which Organization is performing better than others?
  3. Is there fraudulent behavior happening?

With the Splunk App for Hyperledger Fabric, you’ll able to get full visibility into the system metrics, application data and ledger so that you can maintain security, stability and performance for your Hyperledger Fabric deployment.

Getting Started

Need help or want to benefit from Splunk Blockchain solutions? Contact us to find out.

Happy Splunking!
-Stephen and Jeff

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Thanks!
Jeff Wu

Splunk
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