Ethereum solo staker monitoring: real-time alerts for home validators
What this is: Eyrium watches attestation, proposal, and sync-committee duties, plus slashing, balance, status, and credential changes. Alerts land on your phone, Telegram, or email.
Free tier: 1 validator, email alerts, no expiry. Built for the solo staker who runs one validator and just needs to know when something breaks.
Pro ($7/mo): Up to 200 validators, iOS + Android push, and native Telegram. The full stack for someone running a few validators at home.
Built by: A solo home staker. Not a staking pool. Not an infrastructure company.
The solo staker problem nobody solves for you
If you run an enterprise staking operation, you have a monitoring team, a pager rotation, and probably a Grafana stack. When something breaks at 3am, someone's phone rings.
If you're a solo home staker, that person is you — and you only find out if you get the notification.
There are two obvious approaches: refresh beaconcha.in when you remember, or set up a generic monitor that pages on every head-only miss. Neither works well. The first is reactive. The second trains you to ignore alerts until a real failure slips through silent.
The failure modes that actually matter for solo stakers are specific:
Missed attestation streak. A single miss and a sustained run of consecutive misses are different signals. Head-only misses can occur on healthy validators. A run of consecutive misses may indicate a node, client, or sync problem — the sooner it surfaces, the sooner you can check.
Slashing. Catastrophic and nearly always operational — duplicate keys running on two machines after a failover, a DR restore that didn't cleanly exit on the original, or a VM snapshot rehydration that brought a stale validator back online. Your own ETH. One moment of confusion during a migration and it's gone.
Fee-recipient change. A supply-chain attack on your staking setup — someone modifies your configuration so block rewards route to their address instead of yours. Silent until you notice the rewards don't add up.
Balance drop. Offline penalties accumulate. You want to know before the quiet erosion becomes a visible dent.
There's no ops team to catch these. The monitoring is your responsibility, which means the monitoring has to actually work — low noise, fast signal, delivered to wherever you'll see it.
Why alert fatigue kills solo validator monitoring
Ethereum attestation monitoring has a specific noise problem: head-only misses.
When a validator's attestation loses only the head component — because the head block arrived late, or inclusion slipped past the one-slot window — it registers as a miss on the beacon chain. A generic monitoring tool pages on every one. These can occur on healthy validators.
The standard outcome: alert fatigue sets in. You mute the monitor, or you start ignoring notifications. Then you miss the alert when your node actually crashes.
Eyrium has two controls specifically for this:
- Configurable streak threshold (1–10). Set how many consecutive missed attestations trigger an alert. You pick the threshold; there is no universal right answer, so tune it against your own miss history.
- Head-only-miss suppression. Filter out misses where only the head component was missed, and don't count them toward your streak. The slot still gets flagged in your history; it just doesn't page you.
Together, these let you decide which misses are worth an interruption without losing any of the record. That's what keeps alerts trustworthy long enough to be useful.
What Eyrium monitors (full alert list)
- Missed attestation — configurable streak threshold (1–10 consecutive misses before firing), with optional head-only-miss suppression. The primary alert for "my node is down."
- Slashing / exit / withdrawal — a single status-change alert covers the full range of validator state transitions: active → slashed, active → exiting, and withdrawal processing. You don't need separate alerts for each; one notification covers the state machine.
- Balance drop — fires when your effective balance falls below a threshold. Catches accumulating offline penalties before they become significant.
- Fee-recipient / credentials change — the fee recipient is verified on every block your validator proposes, and the alert fires when it changes. Withdrawal-credential changes are caught on the next finalized-checkpoint processing cycle, catching someone redirecting your withdrawal destination. Supply-chain protection.
- Missed proposal — fires when your validator is assigned a block proposal and the slot goes empty. Proposals are rare and worth real money, so this one is worth acting on immediately. Successful proposals show up in your event feed too.
- Sync-committee participation — records upcoming assignments, alerts on the first missed signature in an incident, and tells you when participation recovers.
There is no sync-committee alert yet.
The free tier is built for you
Most monitoring products treat free tiers as an acquisition hook — crippled enough that you upgrade quickly.
The Eyrium free tier is genuinely useful for the smallest solo staker: 1 validator, all four alert types, email delivery, no time limit. If you run exactly one validator and you check email, the free tier is complete coverage.
You upgrade to Pro ($7/mo) when:
- You want alerts on your phone, not just in your inbox (iOS and Android apps are live)
- You want a Telegram bot that messages you natively
- You're running more than one validator (Pro covers up to 200)
No per-validator pricing. No compute-unit model. Flat $7/mo.
Delivery channels
| Channel | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Telegram (native bot) | — | ✓ |
| Android native push | — | ✓ (live on Google Play) |
| iOS native push | — | ✓ (live on the App Store) |
There is no Discord, no Slack, no SMS, and no webhook.
Who built this
Eyrium was built by a solo home staker who got tired of the same problem: either refresh the dashboard manually, or fight alert fatigue from a monitor that pages on every head-only miss. The streak threshold and head-only-miss suppression aren't features that shipped because a product manager thought they sounded good — they're the specific controls a solo staker actually needed.
FAQ
- What's the best free validator monitoring tool for solo stakers?
- Eyrium's free tier covers 1 validator with email alerts for all event types — missed attestations, missed proposals, sync-committee misses, slashing, balance drops, status changes (exit, withdrawal), and credentials/fee-recipient changes. beaconcha.in also offers free email alerts. The practical difference is noise control: Eyrium's configurable streak threshold and head-only-miss suppression reduce notification volume without discarding history; beaconcha.in's alert system doesn't have equivalent filtering.
- How do I stop getting flooded with missed attestation alerts?
- Two controls in Eyrium address this. Raise the streak threshold so isolated misses don't page you, and enable head-only-miss suppression. The head-only filter suppresses only head-only notifications; the streak filter waits for consecutive real misses, so an isolated target or source miss can also be held back at a higher threshold. There is no universal threshold — tune it against your own history. Every miss remains in your event history and API.
- Do I get slashing alerts on the free tier?
- Yes. Slashing is a status-change event, and status-change alerts are included on all tiers including free. If your 1 validator gets slashed, you get an email. You don't need a paid plan for that.
- How fast will I know if my validator goes offline?
- Eyrium checks every newly finalized epoch and evaluates your miss streak against finalized reward data. Once detected, native push and Telegram are near-instant; email still depends on provider delivery time.
- I run Rocket Pool. Does Eyrium work with minipool validators?
- Yes. Eyrium monitors validators you add by their validator pubkey, regardless of the type of node software you're running. A Rocket Pool minipool validator works the same as any other. Add the validator pubkey in Eyrium and alerts fire on the same events. Note: Rocket Pool-specific events (commission changes, RPL collateral, node health) are not Eyrium alert types — it watches the beacon chain, not the Rocket Pool contracts.
- What about Dappnode or eth-docker? Any setup required?
- No integration needed. You only need your validator pubkey. Eyrium doesn't connect to your node — it monitors the beacon chain directly. Whatever client stack you're running underneath, if the validator is on mainnet, Eyrium can watch it.
- I only run 1 validator. Is $7/mo worth it?
- Probably not — the free tier is designed for exactly this case. 1 validator, email alerts, all event types. Upgrade to Pro if you want phone push notifications or Telegram. If email is sufficient, the free tier has no gaps.
- Does Eyrium have a mobile app?
- Yes. The iOS app is live on the App Store and the Android app is live on Google Play.
Start monitoring in under two minutes.
Add your validator pubkey, confirm your email, done. Free tier covers 1 validator with full alert coverage — no credit card, no expiry. Running more than one validator or want alerts on your phone? Pro is $7/mo flat.
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