Telemetry
Every node reports to the Orbinum telemetry dashboard by default — block height,
finalized height, peer count, transaction pool, propagation time, version and
approximate location. Your node appears within seconds of starting, under the
name in VALIDATOR_NAME / RPC_NAME.
It is an outbound connection: no port to open, no firewall rule, and it works on a node whose RPC is loopback-only.
Nodes submit to wss://telemetry.orbinum.io/submit/. The dashboard you
open in a browser is telemetry.orbinum.network.
The mismatch is not a typo — do not point one at the other.
The value
node-deploy already sets this per role:
TELEMETRY_URL=--telemetry-url "wss://telemetry.orbinum.io/submit/ 1" # validators
TELEMETRY_URL=--telemetry-url "wss://telemetry.orbinum.io/submit/ 0" # RPC and archive
Three parts of that string are load-bearing:
- The quotes stay. The node parses
"<url> <level>"as a single argument. Without them the level is read as a separate flag and startup fails. - The trailing slash stays.
/submitwithout it does not upgrade. - The digit is the verbosity level, not a placeholder.
Levels: why validators use 1
| Role | Level | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Validator | 1 | Adds afg.authority_set — the only message carrying your validator address, which is what fills the Address column |
| Public RPC | 0 | Standard detail; no validator address to report |
| Indexer archive | 0 | Same, and reporting does not expose its loopback RPC |
Level 0 on a validator leaves the Address column blank.
For RPC and development nodes telemetry is optional. For validators it is a requirement, not a default you may turn off: it is how the team confirms your node is synced and authoring before approving you, and how anyone can see the set is healthy afterwards. A validator that disappears from the dashboard is indistinguishable from one that is down.
Changing it needs a recreate, not a restart
A container's command line is fixed at creation. docker compose restart brings
the node back with its old arguments — the edit appears to do nothing.
docker compose up -d --force-recreate orbinum-validator
Confirm the running command actually changed:
docker inspect orbinum-validator --format '{{join .Config.Cmd " "}}'
This applies to any .env edit, not just telemetry.
Opting out
Set the variable empty and recreate. That genuinely silences the node: the chain
spec carries "telemetryEndpoints": [], so there is no fallback destination.
That emptiness is deliberate. The spec previously inherited Parity's endpoint
from its source, which meant opting out quietly redirected the same data to
telemetry.polkadot.io rather than stopping it.