A Toolbox for Monitoring the Health of the Ethereum P2P Network
Yiannis Psaras · Dennis Trautwein
Yiannis presents ProbeLab's toolbox for monitoring the health of the Ethereum P2P network, with Dennis joining for a live demo. The talk covers Nebula for crawling and liveness monitoring across DiscV4, DiscV5, and libp2p networks, surfacing findings such as Nimbus being the consensus client least dependent on cloud infrastructure and Unichain being the most popular chain on Optimism. It then walks through Ants, a honeypot-style DHT measurement system that places nodes roughly every 20 keyspace positions to capture client requests, followed by Hermes, a lightweight gossipsub listener that traces grafts, prunes, IHAVE/IWANT messages, and peer scoring, revealing that around 55% of blob messages are delivered four times or fewer and that IHAVE messages account for about 33% of total bandwidth. Yiannis also introduces Ukla, a bandwidth measurement tool that connects to live peers via Hermes and downloads carefully sized data to probe available bandwidth across the slot, showing dips in cloud-node bandwidth that are relevant for PeerDAS and larger blob counts. Dennis closes with a live demo against Ethereum mainnet from the venue, walking through the resulting per-visit records of compressed and uncompressed bytes, retries, and throughput, and outlines plans for a public data API and an updated NAT traversal study.
