Surge FAQ
Surge is the all-in-one monitor for your node’s health and performance. With Surge activated, you are able to see at a glance the performance of your node including metrics such as peer health, uptime, channel activity, and more. With Surge you can know your node. Surge provides data over time, so you can easily see the performance and uptime of channels in a given time period.
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.
Surge can help you make decisions regarding your node’s performance quickly and efficiently. The data presented is easily understood and actionable, which saves the node manager time and effort in trying to filter and understand node data.
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.
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.
For Voltage hosted nodes, you will see no performance degredation. If you are running the Surge agent locally, the agent has a very minimal footprint on your CPU and memory due to it only utilizing limited gRPC connections to access and transmit data.
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.
We plan on having the Agent code open source in the near future.
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.
No.
Yes, but if your node has data compaction on, compacted data will not be uploaded.
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.
For initial launch, LND v0.15.1-beta-rc2 and higher will be supported.
Last modified 2mo ago