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TLDR:
  • Demonstrates building a real-time network health monitoring dashboard for Polkadot mainnet.
  • Shows how to work with Substrate interface to query network statistics, validators, staking, and governance data.
  • Includes practical examples of data visualization and continuous monitoring with graceful error handling.

Overview

Polkadot is a multi-chain blockchain protocol that enables different blockchains to transfer messages and value in a trust-free fashion. Polkadot relies on validators to secure the network and produce blocks. This tutorial guides you through creating a sample real-time network health monitoring dashboard for Polkadot. You’ll learn how to connect to the Polkadot network using the Substrate interface, fetch critical network metrics including block production, validator statistics, staking information, and governance data, and create an interactive dashboard with live updates.

Prerequisites

Network health monitoring dashboard

Now let’s create the dashboard. The script connects to the Polkadot network over a Chainstack node WebSocket endpoint, then continuously queries various pallets to gather network statistics, validator information, staking metrics, and governance data. The dashboard displays live information about block production, finalization lag, validator counts, staking eras, and governance activity in an organized terminal interface. Here’s the full script and the comments:
where YOUR_CHAINSTACK_WSS_ENDPOINT is your Chainstack WebSocket endpoint.

Conclusion

The monitoring approach demonstrated here can be easily extended to track additional metrics, implement alerting systems, or integrate into larger network monitoring solutions requiring detailed Polkadot network insights.

See also

Polkadot documentation

Substrate Interface documentation

About the author

Ake

Ake Director of Developer Experience @ Chainstack
Talk to me all things Web3
20 years in technology | 8+ years in Web3 full time years experience
Last modified on March 26, 2026