Tools and field notes for DigiDollar oracle operators. A personal watchdog that pages you when your slot goes dark, plus an operator's runbook written from things that actually happened — including what a reboot really does to a running oracle (spoiler: more than you'd think).
Written by the operator of slot 29, live on mainnet since ~40 minutes after DigiDollar activation (block 23,869,440, July 17, 2026). Independent community project — not affiliated with the DigiByte Foundation.
digibyte.io already has an excellent oracle dashboard — it shows the whole room. What it can't do is wake you when your slot stops signing. On testnet, 19 of 35 slots sat dark at one point, some for weeks; nobody was notified, because nothing existed to notify them. DigiDollar's price feed needs 7 of 35 signatures — every dark slot thins the margin.
The monitor is the complement, not a replacement: a small watchdog on your own box, checking your own node, paging your own phone.
| Check | Alert when |
|---|---|
| Daemon process (testnet + mainnet) | digibyted not running |
| RPC | daemon up but not answering |
| Sync | in IBD, header lag, or stale tip |
| Oracle wallet | not loaded |
| Your oracle slot | not reporting, stale/invalid heartbeat, or absent from getoracles — with wallet-locked detection and fix instructions in the alert itself |
| DigiDollar deployment (mainnet) | state changes (e.g. the moment it flips active, with your start instructions) |
| Disk / version drift | low space; local version behind latest release |
| Daily heartbeat | one quiet "all is well" so silence never means "broken monitor" |
Alerts dedupe (re-send every realert_hours), and every failure sends a matching
RECOVERED notice. Channels: ntfy (easiest — install the app,
subscribe to your topic, done), Telegram bot, or any webhook.
Read-only by design: status RPCs only. It never touches keys, wallets, or passphrases — your passphrase is typed by you, at a keyboard, or not at all.
The monitor runs on the same Windows box as your node and oracle, and pages your phone through ntfy — a free, open-source push service. No account needed anywhere: a private topic name is the entire channel.
1. Install the official ntfy app (there are lookalikes in both stores — use
these exact links; the real one is by Philipp Heckel, package io.heckel.ntfy):
- Android: Google Play · F-Droid
- iPhone: App Store
- Project: github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy · docs.ntfy.sh
Allow notifications when the app asks.
2. Invent your private topic name — long and random, like
dgb-oracle7-k3x9v2m8q4w6. The topic is a password: anyone who knows it can read
your alert stream and send you fake alerts. Don't pick anything guessable, don't
post it anywhere. (install.ps1 suggests a random one if you leave the placeholder.)
3. Subscribe your phone: ntfy app → + (Add subscription) → server ntfy.sh →
enter your topic → subscribe. Then add ntfy to your Do-Not-Disturb / sleep-focus
exceptions — a 3 a.m. page that politely respects DND is a diary entry, not an alert.
4. On the oracle box — clone or download this repo anywhere (e.g. C:\oracle-ops):
cd oracle-ops\monitor
copy config.json.example config.json
notepad config.json # set: oracle_id, oracle_wallet, cli_exe, datadir, ntfy_topic5. Install (elevated PowerShell):
.\install.ps1 # creates the 5-min scheduled task + fires a test alert6. Verify: the test alert should hit your phone within seconds. If it doesn't:
check the app's subscription topic matches config.json exactly, and that
notifications are allowed. You can also watch the raw stream in any browser at
https://ntfy.sh/<your-topic>.
From then on: red alerts only when something is actually wrong (with the fix commands
in the message body), a green RECOVERED notice when it clears, re-alerts every
realert_hours while a problem persists, and one quiet daily heartbeat so silence
never means "the monitor died." Prefer Telegram or a webhook instead of ntfy? Both
supported — see config.json.example.
Supported today: Windows (PowerShell 5.1+, scheduled task). One trap for anyone
extending the script: PowerShell aliases outrank functions — a function named
Cli silently invokes the built-in cli alias (Clear-Item) instead of itself, and
"$var: text" in double quotes parses the colon as scope syntax (use "${var}:").
Both were found the hard way on a live deployment; stick to Verb-Noun names. Linux/macOS
operators: the checks are a direct translation (getblockchaininfo, listwallets,
getoracles, getdigidollardeploymentinfo + curl to ntfy, under cron/systemd). PRs
welcome — this repo would happily carry a bash twin.
runbook.md — what a hard reboot does to your oracle (chainstate rollback, the misleading "DigiDollar is not yet active" error, why auto-start won't resume with an encrypted wallet), the recovery procedure, how to avoid all of it with a clean stop — and the proven two-chain upgrade template (v9.26.4 → v9.26.5 in ~25 minutes, no rollback). Learned on a live slot so you don't have to.
If you haven't upgraded yet: v9.26.5's versionbits cache cuts the mainnet oracle startup scan from ~15 minutes to seconds, so every future restart gets cheaper. Drop-in binaries, no consensus change.
Part of dgb-tools — open-source DigiByte tooling for the agent economy: payments, identity, attestation, and a live x402 gateway.
MIT.