APEX Pool is a small pool, so for the moment there is no need for a lot of tools, because nothing really happens. But for the moment the following tools are used:
- Munin, for monitoring a lot of metrics, like CPU and memory usage, load average, disk usage, disk I/O operations and many other useful metrics.
- Guild LiveView on all nodes, including the block producer. It gives you a lot of information about how things are going with your node. It is a part of this: https://github.com/cardano-community/guild-operators, among other tools, including scripts that will help you create a staking pool easier. These scripts were not used to create this staking pool, the instructions from the Cardano documentation (docs.cardano.org) were used.
- cardano-db-sync on a dedicated node. This is a tools from IOHK that reads the data from a node (running locally) and replicates it into a postgresql database. You can do a lot of interesting queries there. Most likely the tools like pool tools (adapools.org, pooltool.io, the cardano blockchain explorers) are using this for the information they provide. This is on a dedicated node, because it requires a lot of resources and it would affect the relay nodes.
- cncli on the same node with cardano-db-sync. This tool can do many things, but I guess the most useful is to find out, 36 hours before a new epoch starts, if your pool was selected to produce blocks in the next epoch, and when it is scheduled to do it. This tool needs a sqlite database to read the information from, and this database is created by itself, running in the background and replication information from blockchain into the sqlite database. It only replicates a part of the information, what it needs for what is can provide. The same tool is also used to publish the height on pooltool.io, to show that the pool is working properly.
This is how some of these tools look like:
Block producer:
One of the relays:
