Monitoring with Ctnstats
Last edited on February 16, 2026Ctnstats is a service that displays real time and historical statistics about individual nodes connected to a network and about the network itself. Individual node statistics include the last received block, block time, propagation time, connected peers, latency etc. Network metrics include the number of nodes, average block times, node geolocation, transaction counts etc.
These statistics are presented to the user in the form of a dashboard served to a web browser. This can be configured using the public Ctnstats server for Centurion mainnet or some public testnets, or using a local copy of Ctnstats for private networks. This page will demonstrate how to set up a Ctnstats dashboard for private and public networks.
Prerequisites
To follow the instructions on this page the following are required:
- Go Centurion
- Node
- NPM
- Git
Ctnstats
Ctnstats has three components:
-
a server that consumes data sent to it by each individual node on a network and serves statistics generated from that data.
-
a client that queries a node and sends its data to the server
-
a dashboard that displays the statistics generated by the server
The summary dashboard for Centurion Mainnet can be viewed at ctnstats.dev.
Note that the Ctnstats dashboard is not a reliable source of information about the entire Centurion network because submitting data to the Ctnstats server is voluntary and has to be configured by individual nodes. Therefore, many nodes are omitted from the summary statistics.
How to use
To report statistics about the local node to Ctnstats, a Ctnstats server and Ctnstats client both have to be installed alongside Go Centurion. There are several options for installing Ctnstats clients and servers, each with detailed installation instructions. They all share the common trait that a Ctnstats service is started with a specific URL that can be passed to Go Centurion.
[Ctnstats "Classic"]
[EthNet Intelligence API]
If enabled, Go Centurion spins up a minimal Ctnstats reporting daemon that pushes statistics about the local node to the Ctnstats server.
To enable this, start Go Centurion with the ethstats flag, passing the Ctnstats service (nodename:secret@host:port) URL.
geth <other commands> --ethstats node1:secret:127.0.0.1:9000
The local node will then report to Ctnstats, and the statistics will be displayed in a dashboard that can be accessed via the web browser.
Note on WS_secret
The WS_secret parameter is required for connecting to a Ctnstats server. For a local network this can be user-defined on startup by providing it as an environment variable. However, for Centurion mainnet and the public testnets predefined values must be known. Historically these have been made available on Gitter and Skype channels or a forum, but these are no longer in use. The user will have to track down existing Ctnstats users to request the WS_secret.