Today we are excited to show the proof of all of the work we have put into Surge.
The Lightning Network is one of the most powerful payment networks in the world. For Lightning to service the world it needs tools that enable businesses to better manage their capital while giving transparency across the organization.
Introducing Surge
Our users can now deploy Surge onto their Voltage node and have access to time series data and insights that have been available but have always required labor-intensive efforts. Surge is bringing this data into a visual format that helps decision-making make swift, helpful, and actionable decisions for more efficient node operations.
Let’s dive into what Surge can actually do!
For starters, Surge separates observability from actions of node management.
Today, Surge is a read-only product. You can now give Surge to a support agent, accountant or key stakeholder so that others can have insights into node performance without being able to perform any actions against it. Now node operators can empower other team members with powerful insights that help level up customer support and financial accounting.
Typically an executive leader or technical manager has access to the production node, now other users can be on the watch for issues as infrastructure scales.
Peer Management
Node runners can now surface which peers are used to send and receive funds the most. Quickly find which peers need more channels opened to them and which require rebalancing. You can also quickly identify which peers forward the most payments and have improved aggregate visibility and analytics into the future for your node. This is especially powerful for nodes who earn routing yield.
Channel Uptime
Users can easily see which nodes and channels go down. By seeing the historical uptime of both nodes and channels, node runners can better discern where payments are failing and which peers are degrading their nodes’ performance.
Channel States
When channels are not managed properly capital sits idle and user experience is degraded. We have helped solve and simplify this in a few ways. We will break this down in 3 ways:
- Active (not utilized): the channel technically works, but for whatever reason it hasn’t seen any activity in the last few weeks. This is money not being utilized effectively and should be reallocated.
- Inactive: for whatever reason, the channel is offline. This means no payments can go through it. This could be a potential bad channel partner and will give you valuable data as to whether you should open more channels with them in the future. retrieving those funds is likely going to be difficult (because you’ll likely have to force close those channels).
- Active: implicitly these are funds that are being utilized, and this is the optimal state for your funds in channels. Money is being used to perform payments.
Time Series of Balances
Users can now visualize their channel and node balances over time. This drastically helps improve monitoring the history of node performance, while helping detect anomalies in payments.
Failed Payment Debugging
Through new visualizations, Surge helps node runners debug failed payments by showing relevant information and showing statuses over time. There are many various factors that can lead to a failed payment, and Surge does a lot to help users reduce these issues.
Installing Surge
To install Surge on your Voltage node simply follow the steps below. It only takes a minute and you’ll be up and running in no time.
Pricing
We have made it easy to get started with straightforward pricing and the ability to scale with your operations.
Surge cost per Agent:
$10 per month (includes 15,000,000 compute units per month)
$0.000001 per compute unit over 15,000,000 per month
The $10 of free credit applied on sign up can be used on Surge Compute Units as well as nodes.
Try it out on your node!
Share questions and feedback in real-time on our Discord. We will be making many more updates, adding new features, and soon making Surge available for all Lightning users outside of Voltage.
Read the Documentation.
