Hi everyone! I'm working on a few articles to go over Vault Staking's updates, roadmap, and highlights, but I wanted to give you a quick update on the Matic Staking UI's completely new look, and a change to the Checkpoint Signed metric.
Well, the UI is completely redesigned from the ground up. It looks amazing, and adds some great new metrics and numbers that were not previously visible. It also has a clean new look to it. What I would like to address in this article is the Checkpoints Signed percentage. Previously, Checkpoints Signed was based on the lifespan of the validator. For example, Vault Staking has been signing checkpoints for 5.5 months, which is roughly 4,800 checkpoints in that time. If we miss 10 checkpoints in that time, our Checkpoints Signed percentage would be affected by 0.21%. The new UI only looks at the past 150 checkpoints (or roughly 20-25 days) instead of all time. If we miss 10 checkpoints now, our Checkpoints Signed percentage would be affected by 6.67%. This is what happened the other day; on 3/18 we missed about 10 checkpoints and our Checkpoints Signed percentage went down about 0.2%. We were still well above 99% for all checkpoints signed. Now that the metrics have changed, we are now around 92%, which looks horrible compared to others and even compared to our previous stability. I assure you, there has not been a drastic change to our stability and we are still signing blocks and producing rewards for our delegates.
I don't want to be in the position to lose that many checkpoints again, so I've added a lot of alerts and monitoring to have constant oversight of my validator.
Pictured above is one of the many Grafana dashboards for the status of your specific validator. It shows quite a bit of details to include Node Status, Current Block Height, if the validator has miss any blocks, and if the validator is caught up. Other dashboards show the health and status of the nodes, how much CPU and RAM is being used, server uptime, and how much data is sent to and from the node.
The Polygon team has also added a way to get notifications sent to Telegram, so now validators can opt in to receiving health and status updates directly to their phone. This gives us constant contact with our node. I personally also wrote a program to compare the overall checkpoint of the network and the latest Vault Staking checkpoint to assure we are on the latest checkpoint. If there is a discrepancy, it emails and texts me so I can check it out immediately.
Hopefully that clears up the reason why Vault Staking's uptime looks much worse than it did a few days ago. I know it looks bad, but in a few weeks we'll be right back up in the 99% and will continue to give all delegators their rewards.
More to come. As always, let me know if you have any questions. You can always reach out in the comments or DM me on Discord (AlgoRhythm#2931). Thanks for reading!
