# Securing your validator

### Rationale

As a validator, you are one of the key enablers of block production and consensus, and you need to maintain your reputation in eyes of the nominators. To that end, a validator node has to maintain:

* high availability: for uninterrupted operation
* high security, especially with regard to its session keys: if a malicious actor managed to access the keys, they would be able to commit slashable behavior on behalf of the validator

### High availability

Even though, in contrast to a lot of chains, the Aleph Zero chain does not punish downtime by slashing, it is still in your best interest to be online as much as possible for two main reasons:

* you are not getting rewards for the time you are offline
* your nominators will notice that your node is not reliable and will choose to nominate another validator.

Some recommendations are quite trivial but important nonetheless:

* run on good quality hardware and prefer bare metal to VM-s
* ensure stable and fast internet connection
* make sure you have plenty of disk space (or monitor it regularly if you want to provision it on demand)

While it may seem like a good idea to introduce redundancy (i.e. run more than one node as the same validator), it is **not** a good idea:

* you will need to somehow share the session keys between the nodes and that may expose them
* you may be slashed for equivocation if both nodes are taking part in the consensus at the same time

### Security

As mentioned above, you need to keep your keys a secret and the best way to start is to follow standard security practices:

* setup a firewall and only expose to the outside world the ports you really need (in case of the validator node it is ports **30333 and 30343** for libp2p protocol/validator network, and a port for SSH access)
* you may want to change the SSH port to something less obvious than 22
* disable password authentication in SSH and only use key-based authentication
* for the safest setup, you may consider turning SSH off altogether (if you have physical access to the machine)
* avoid using the root account

### Monitoring

We suggest monitoring your nodes using a combination of these methods:

* [Performance statistics in the azero.dev wallet.](https://azero.dev/#/staking/query)
* Grafana: for setting up your own dashboards with detailed metrics
* [Telemetry](https://telemetry.azero.dev/): for publicly sharing basic statistics about your node
* Logs: for manually monitoring the health of your node

**Grafana**

It is recommended to setup monitoring and alerts for your node using the standard Prometheus metrics (by default exposed by Aleph Node on port 9615). The recommended tool for digesting the metrics is Grafana and for convenience we've made the config template available [here](https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/16691).

**Telemetry**

The telemetry is enabled by default in the dockerised setup. If you want to disable it (which we strongly advise against), go to your `env/validator` config file and set `TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false`.

If the telemetry is enabled, you will be able to monitor your node's performance [here](https://telemetry.polkadot.io/#list/0x05d5279c52c484cc80396535a316add7d47b1c5b9e0398dd1f584149341460c5).

{% hint style="info" %}
If you're building the node from source and running a plain binary, you will need to supply the `--telemetry-url 'wss://telemetry.polkadot.io/submit/ 1'` option when you run the node.
{% endhint %}

**Logs**

The text logs from the node can provide useful information when something is wrong. You may want to keep an eye out for:

* various error messages
* lack of messages about finalization or importing
* your node being behind on finalization for prolonged periods of time


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