The 1.4.0 release announcement with operations metrics and health check is a feature that fulfilled the dream. Even though it doesn't provide a lot of useful metrics, some of the basic ones really gives the operators and developers some insights on what is happening with the blockchain network.

The screen shot above is a local installation of a basic-network with fab car deployed on top. Metrics enabled with operation services both for the orderer and the peer. Prometheus pulls the metrics form Hyperledger. The grafana dashboard shows details more on the orderer metrics, but again limited info since it is a basic-network with SOLO. There are a few metrics available if we have Kafka or the new RAFT base consensus service. I’ll post samples of a dashboard showing Kafka and RAFT metrics in my next article.

Even though Kubernetes enables us a way to get some of the metrics but it is a black-box with Hyperledger Fabric core components. Seeing pod metrics isn't enough at times. Istio is another eye opener to run and monitor Hyperledger Fabric in a micro-services architecture, but nothing published officially.

The following video shows a small snippet of what basic metrics could be brought into life using the operations service.

Please look out for my next article for a complete developer walk-thru on: Configuring and enabling metrics using operations services, prometheus to capture the metrics and use grafana to create a basic dashboard.

Pre-requisites

For Mac OS

Install Java SDK (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html)

Install VSCode (https://code.visualstudio.com/download)

Install Hyperledger Composer Extension for VSCode , make sure to reload

Install PlantUML for VSCode, make sure to reload

Setup a Composer Project and start defining your CTO (Model). The one I am using is the basic-network, which has Sample Assets, Sample Participants, Sample Transactions & Sample Events defined in the CTO file.

Once your model is finalized or whenever you need to generate a UML diagram, just Right-Click as show in the figure below and Choose “Generate UML”

You’ll see a new window with the generated UML diagram.

Very simple steps but very powerful feature.