Hello ICON, Insight here to update the community with our progress as we head into our first fully remote session with over 400 fellows participating across all our locations. Last session was extremely busy for us as we had 6 fellows work on ICON related projects. Several area high value projects were executed on topics including secrets management, host intrusion detection systems, monitoring, continuous integration, and monitoring. We made a lot of progress since our last update with our new contributions broadly fitting into the following categories.

  1. Automated node deployments
  2. Network status page
  3. Fellow program

Automated node deployments


Building automated deployments of various infrastructure components for ICON is basically our bread and butter, this is what we are good at. Its been a long road to get to where we are at right now with three complete rewrites of the codebase. The current codebase is now being built to support multiple different node configurations on each major cloud provider. These node configurations will allow operators to add additional layers of security and protection to their nodes along with deploying infrastructure that DApps use to interface with the blockchain. Multiple cloud providers including AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, Packet, and Hetzner will soon be supported which will encourage heterogeniety and decentralization of the network.

Our node deployment tooling is wrapped with an easy to use command line interface that will guide users into how to enter the exact information they need to deploy their node on their own. This new interface will be released officially in about a month with beta users within a week.

Our efforts are further summarized in the following project descriptions which are broken into two categories. First is the "P-Rep Node Deployment Automation" project which is focused on the provisioning of the servers and network topologies. The next part is the "Ansible P-Rep Roles" project which focuses on automating the configuration of the servers. Please take a minute to learn more about via the links below and check out links to our task management systems to see exactly what is currently being worked on.

ICON Node Deployment Automation

ICON Node Configuration Roles

ICON Network Automation Tasks

Network status page


In late March, the ICON Foundation gave Insight a request for proposal to build a status page for the network. Instead of going through a drawn out proposal process, we interfaced directly with the main engineer at ICON requesting the project and simply built it pro bono under their guidance. It started off with deploying three sample status pages until one was determined to meet most of the feature requests. The page is still in development and will be officially announced in about a month, but you can find a cut down sample at icon.status-page.net. Further features such as plots showing historical uptime statistics, configurable notifications of network outages, incident reports, and telegram bots to interact with the page are in various stages of development.

Status pages are generally very high level monitoring tools used primarily as a means to communicate incidents from operators to the users of applications. To actually monitor a network with precision, additional monitoring tools need to be employed with the most robust solutions revolving around the prometheus ecosystem. In order to deliver a fully capable monitoring solution able to give observability over all aspects of a network, Insight is also pursuing a official monitoring project. This project when done will deliver enterprise grade monitoring and alerting allowing node operators to enact a proactive maintenance program diagnosing problems before they rise up to the level at which they would actually cause downtime. Please check the below two project links for more details or checkout our task management system to see exactly what we are working on.

Status Page

Node Monitoring and Alerting

ICON Monitoring Task Management