Clear DefinitionsFork Monitoring
1 min read
Pronunciation
[fork mon-i-ter-ing]
Analogy
Like air traffic control tracking multiple flight paths and alerting when two planes diverge unexpectedly.
Definition
The continuous surveillance of blockchain consensus for chain splits, stale blocks, or competing forks, enabling rapid detection of network instability or attacks.
Key Points Intro
Fork monitoring ensures blockchain health by detecting and alerting on consensus divergences.
Key Points
Head tracking: Observes new block headers across peers.
Fork alerts: Notifies when multiple heads share same parent.
Orphan rate: Measures frequency of stale or uncle blocks.
Network metrics: Correlates forks with latency and node count.
Example
Technical Deep Dive
Monitoring agents subscribe to P2P `newHeads`, record block hashes and parent relationships in Prometheus. Grafana dashboards show fork depth and P95 propagation times. Alertmanager sends Slack notifications on fork events.
Security Warning
Undetected forks can lead to double‑spend vulnerabilities; maintain diverse peer connections and alert thresholds.
Caveat
Short-lived forks are normal in PoW; tune alerts to avoid noise.
Fork Monitoring - Related Articles
No related articles for this term.