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Introducing AlertHub to Monitor Your Algorand Accounts

Sooin Yoon
Sooin Yoon Metrika
January 14, 2021

AlertHub is a platform that enables monitoring and real-time alerting on Algorand addresses so that users can maintain the health of their accounts and the overall Algorand network. The platform was developed by Metrika, through a grant by the Algorand Foundation. We’re excited to share this tool with the developer community so that everyone can participate in keeping the Algorand network operationally healthy.

Alert Types

AlertHub currently offers five alerts:

  • Consensus Participation: According to the Algorand Pure Proof-of-Stake protocol, addresses that are online and hold a stake in the network participate in the consensus mechanism. Oftentimes, issues such as a misconfigured node or network problems can cause an address to fail to cast votes. To inform about such issues, AlertHub can notify you when an address is not casting votes as expected.

  • Key Expiration: In order for an Algorand address to participate in the consensus mechanism, the account owner needs to have a valid participation key. AlertHub’s key expiration alerts can inform you when your key is about to or has expired.

  • Account Status Change: An Algorand address can take three statuses: (1) Online, (2) Offline, and (3) Non-Participating. Online status is required for an account to participate in the consensus mechanism, and if an address reaches the non-participating state, it can never go back and earn rewards on its balance. AlertHub can send alerts to help you track any account status changes.

  • Account Balance Zero: An Algorand account can be closed and removed from the ledger via a close transaction. In order to keep you informed about your account’s state, AlertHub provides an alert when an account has been closed.

  • Large Transaction: AlertHub can notify you of transfers greater than 250K Algos to monitor Algos coming in and out of an account.

How AlertHub can help

Say your account is currently participating in the Algorand consensus protocol. This means that at some point in time you generated a participation key using the goal account addpartkey command. All participation keys by design have an expiration round. If you own or manage multiple accounts, it can be cumbersome to monitor each key’s expiration round.

AlertHub’s Key Expiration alert can help you proactively manage your participation keys and prevent unwanted key expiration events. If your key is within 48 hours of expiring, you will receive an email notification like the one below:
EditorImages/2021/01/08 22:28/AlertHub_DevPortal_Article_KeyImage.png

The email also contains other useful information. The first is a recommendation on how to resolve this alert with a link to instructions on renewing your key according to Algorand’s developer documentation. The second is a link that takes you to your AlertHub homepage that summarizes the current state of all your alerts:
EditorImages/2021/01/08 22:38/AlertHub_DevPortal_Article_HomeImage.png

Conclusion

Try out AlertHub and join our community! We strongly believe that everyone contributes to making Algorand a performant and secure network. We hope AlertHub can make it easy for community members to keep their accounts running smoothly.

We are continuing to develop the platform and work on new features, and we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch with us at [email protected].