Proposal: Canton Observability Standard (COS)

Development Fund Proposal Submission

Proposal file: /proposals/canton-observability-standard.md

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Summary

Canton Observability Standard (COS) delivers a versioned open specification and reference implementation defining canonical metric names, trace span conventions, and production-grade alert rules for Canton node and application deployments. The project ships a reference Prometheus exporter, OpenTelemetry collector configuration, Grafana dashboard pack, and Alertmanager alert rule pack across 4 milestones and requests 1,600,000 CC in milestone-based funding.

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Checklist

• [x] Proposal file added under /proposals/
• [x] Milestones and funding amounts defined
• [x] Acceptance criteria included
• [x] Alignment with Canton priorities described

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Notes for Reviewers

• This proposal is explicitly scoped as a specification and reference implementation, not a hosted monitoring product or a Canton core instrumentation change. COS is purely additive — it introduces no changes to Canton protocol behavior or existing node configuration.
• The initial release is intentionally limited to three signal tiers (participant node health, Ledger API, and synchronizer connectivity) and two output formats (Prometheus and OpenTelemetry) to keep early milestones reviewable and verifiable.
• Each alert rule in the shipped pack includes a documented operational rationale and tuning guidance rather than undocumented numeric defaults, to keep false-positive rate low out of the box.
• The specification is versioned from day one with a documented contribution and amendment process, so the community can extend the standard without forking the canonical namespace.