From zero to a full monitoring dashboard in under an hour. Every command tested on real hardware running Ubuntu + LND.From zero to a full monitoring dashboard in under an hour. Every command tested on real hardware running Ubuntu + LND.

If you run a Bitcoin node, use Lightning, or just care about self-custody, one thing becomes obvious pretty quickly: monitoring your funds isn't as straightforward as it seems.

On-chain is easy — paste an address into an explorer.
Lightning? Not so much.

Here a practical guide showing how to:

• Monitor your on-chain Bitcoin balance
• Track Lightning channels and liquidity
• Verify inbound vs outbound capacity
• Check payments and channel health
• Avoid blindly trusting wallet UI
• Build your own monitoring setup

This is especially useful if you're running your own node and want better visibility instead of guessing what's happening.

The monitoring stack has four components:

Node_exporter — collects system metrics from your machine (CPU, RAM, disk, network). Think of it as the vital signs monitor for your hardware.

Prometheus — a time-series database that scrapes metrics from Node Exporter and lndmon at regular intervals and stores them. It’s the brain that remembers everything.

lndmon — Lightning Labs’ official monitoring exporter for LND. It connects to your LND node via gRPC, collects Lightning-specific metrics (channel balances, routing fees, peer count, HTLC data, graph statistics), and exposes them for Prometheus to scrape.

Grafana — the visualization layer. It pulls data from Prometheus and displays it in beautiful, customizable dashboards with graphs, gauges, and alerts.

The data flows like this: your node → Node Exporter + lndmon → Prometheus → Grafana → your browser.

Full guide:
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidebtc186/p/how-to-monitor-your-bitcoin-and-lightning

Have you set something like this before? Or otherwise how do you monitor your LN node?