Surge Analytics FAQ

what is surge analytics? surge analytics is a voltage specific tool which is primarily used to surface details about your node's behavior these details could be exact reasons channels close, forwarding information, peer information, and other behaviors that your node may be exhibiting that needs further investigation who is surge for? surge is for everyone! however, those who might find very particular use out of it are those running their node as part of a business, wallet, or app service also, those running a high performance routing node may also find usefulness with surge what does surge cost? surge can be turned on at no additional cost however, surge will consume api credits we recommend turning surge on for most users if your api credit allocation is used up during a billing period, then you will automatically be allocated more and charged at the end of the billing cycle what features does surge enable? surge will unlock the channel analytics charts, send/receive activity, peer list, and activity feed to access directly within your voltage node dashboard how do i turn surge on? on your node dashboard, simply toggle the switch next to the surge logo to "on " you will then be greeted with a description of surge, and expected costs of adding surge to your voltage experience if you agree, type in your node password and surge will turn on with surge, you will be able to easily see all activity on your node directly from the voltage node dashboard is surge required? surge is an optional service meant to make node management and decision making much easier, thus saving you and your team time when making important liquidity decisions, or troubleshooting any payment problems how does surge work? surge works by getting your node's information using a voltage developed communication program called the agent the agent is a continuously running program that communicates with your node via a read only macaroon the agent collects various node data and metrics voltage then processes this data and presents it to you through the surge dashboard does the agent program have access to my funds? no the agent is only given permissions of "read only" which means that it does not have access to sending or receiving lightning payments, generating invoices, channel opens/closes, the on chain wallet, or other administrative level tasks payment preimage data is only collected after the invoice generated is settled or when a payment made to someone else is settled what does surge not do? surge is not an interface for opening, closing, or directly managing channels or payments for direct node control, we still recommend either thunderhub or terminal web, both easily accessible from the voltage dashboard is surge open source? we plan on having the agent code open source in the near future what does surge do with my data? when data is sent to surge we store it in databases that we manage this data is not accessible outside of our environment and only selected employees have access to the database to ensure uptime, debug issues, and accomplish maintenance this data is not shared with any person or entity outside of voltage we do not sell any data this data could be used by voltage to enhance our products in an anonymized way to the best of our ability currently this data is retained indefinitely and can be deleted on request does voltage sell data collected from surge? no does surge load historical node data? yes, but if your node has data compaction on, compacted data will not be uploaded do i have to run a voltage hosted node to use surge? a voltage hosted node will be required for initial launch of surge we do plan on releasing the agent binary to run on infrastructure outside of voltage at a later date when the agent binary is released, a voltage hosted node will not be required, and you will still have full access to surge