IPFS Cluster Metrics

Cluster peers run a “monitor” component which is in charge of:

• Distributing arbitrary metrics from the current peer to all the others. Metrics have an associated expiry date.
• Detecting peer-health events and triggering actions
• In crdt-mode, the peerset is defined as the list of peers for which we have received a valid metric.

The metrics are produced by an “informer” component and broadcasted  using libp2p’s GossipSub. There are currently two types of metrics:

• ping: the lack of pings from a given cluster peer signifies that the peer is down and is used to trigger re-pinnings when enabled.
• freespace: informs how much free space IPFS has in its  repository and is used to decide whether to allocate new pins to this  peer or others.

Administrators can inspect the latest metrics received by a peer with the following commands:

$ ipfs-cluster-ctl health metrics # lists available metrics
$ ipfs-cluster-ctl health metrics ping
$ ipfs-cluster-ctl health metrics freespace

Note that:

• The Time-To-Live associated to freespace and other informer-metrics is controlled with the metric_ttl options for the different informers (the disk informer is used by default). Increasing it reduces the number of time a peer sends metrics to the network.
• The Time-To-Live associated to ping metrics is controlled by the cluster.monitor_ping_interval option.
• The pubsubmon.check_interval option controls how often a peer checks for expired metrics from other peers.
• You can read all the details in the Configuration reference.