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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.livepeer.org/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Why a guide on observability

The protocol stores its rules and balances on Arbitrum One. The network’s actual work happens off-chain across orchestrators, gateways, and pipelines that the chain never sees. Reading the network well requires combining on-chain state with off-chain signal - and knowing which signal each surface gives you. A founder evaluating Livepeer needs different data than an orchestrator monitoring its own performance, or a developer integrating a metrics widget into their site. This guide maps the available surfaces to the questions they answer.

The five public surfaces

Each surface has a strict scope. The Explorer cannot tell you whether an orchestrator is currently online. The Grafana dashboards cannot tell you who voted on a LIP. The capabilities API cannot tell you historical revenue. Use the surface that matches the question.

Livepeer Explorer

The Explorer is the canonical view of on-chain protocol state. Everything the protocol contracts hold is queryable here.
The Explorer is the surface to use for any answer that depends on what is actually committed on-chain - not what an orchestrator says it can do, not what historical analytics report. If a question can be answered by reading a contract, use the Explorer.

Subgraph and historical analytics

The Livepeer subgraph indexes every on-chain event into a queryable schema. It is the right surface for time-series questions, custom dashboards, and any analysis that needs more than current state. Common analytics patterns:
  • Network usage - segments transcoded, AI inference calls, total minutes per period.
  • Fee revenue - ETH redeemed by orchestrators per period, demand-side fees per gateway.
  • Orchestrator performance - per-orchestrator round-by-round reward calls, fee earnings, stake changes.
  • Governance participation - votes cast per LIP, quorum trajectories, orchestrator vs delegator participation rates.
  • Treasury activity - treasury inflows from inflation, outflows from passed proposals, balance trajectories.
The subgraph is queried directly with GraphQL, and is the data source behind most public dashboards. For one-off analysis, query it directly. For embedded data products, use it as the backend.

Network dashboards and the leaderboard

Off-chain network performance is published through Grafana dashboards and a performance leaderboard. These surfaces answer questions the chain cannot - latency, throughput, success rate per pipeline, geographical distribution of work. These surfaces have a structural blind spot: they only see what their telemetry covers. An orchestrator that does not publish telemetry is invisible to the dashboards even when it is serving production traffic. Combine off-chain dashboards with on-chain data to see the full picture.

Capabilities API

Each orchestrator publishes its current capabilities as a real-time advertisement: video transcoding profiles, AI inference pipelines, BYOC containers, real-time AI sessions, and the prices for each. Gateways read this advertisement to assemble a working set per job. For an external observer or integrator, the capabilities API is the surface to use to answer:
  • Which orchestrators currently advertise a given AI pipeline.
  • What prices orchestrators are quoting for transcoding profiles.
  • Where the network has spare capacity for a specific workload.
  • Whether a BYOC container is being run by anyone in the active set.
Capability advertisements are bitstrings, not free-form text. The list is governed - new capabilities require a registration that propagates to gateways. The advertisement structure is stable enough to query programmatically.

Embedding live network data

Several of the surfaces above are designed to be embedded in external sites - a portfolio tracker, an orchestrator’s transparency page, a public ecosystem dashboard.

Where to go next

Every Explorer metric explained, with formulas for institutional analysis.

Read paths, surface trade-offs, and off-chain blind spots in detail.

Live on-chain state, governance proposals, and per-orchestrator data.

Indexed historical events for custom analytics and embedded dashboards.
Last modified on May 19, 2026