Chia Farm Alerts: Never Miss a Signage Point or Farm Health Warning

• Key Takeaway 1: Missed signage points and dropped drives won’t always show up on screen — your farm can bleed rewards silently for hours.
• Key Takeaway 2: Chia broadcasts 64 signage points every 10 minutes (9,216 per day). Missing more than 100 in a single day means something is wrong.
• Key Takeaway 3: Chiadog is the community’s go-to alert tool — it parses your debug.log and sends push notifications via Discord, Telegram, Pushover, or email.
• Key Takeaway 4: For multi-harvester farms, chia-monitor with Prometheus and Grafana gives you a full metrics dashboard and flexible custom alert rules.
• Key Takeaway 5: Plot lookup times should stay well under 5 seconds. Consistent lookups above that threshold often signal a drive under stress before it fully fails.
• Key Takeaway 6: Pool farmers get stale partial alerts built in through their pool’s app or dashboard — zero additional setup required.

Chia farm alerts are automated notifications that tell you when something is wrong with your farm — from missed signage points and slow lookup times to offline harvesters and disappearing drives. Without them, you can lose XCH rewards for hours before you even notice. The right alert stack catches problems in minutes, not the next morning.

Why Chia Farm Alerts Matter More Than You Think

Most Chia farmers set up their node, watch it sync, and then walk away. That’s by design — Chia runs quietly in the background and doesn’t demand constant attention. But “quiet” can also mean a problem is building up with no obvious sign. A USB drive that silently unmounts at 2 a.m. costs you every signage point until you notice at breakfast. A harvester that loses its network connection to the farmer just goes dark — it stops responding, and its entire plot space disappears from the lottery without making a sound.

The good news is that Chia’s debug.log records everything. Every signage point your node receives, every plot lookup time, every proof found — it’s all there. Chia farm alert tools exist specifically to watch that log in real time and push a notification the moment something breaks. You don’t need to babysit your terminal. You need the right tools watching it for you.

What Happens When You Miss Signage Points

Chia’s Proof of Space and Time consensus broadcasts exactly 64 signage points every 10 minutes, adding up to 9,216 per day. At each one, your farmer checks its eligible plots for a valid proof of space. If your node is offline or out of sync when a signage point arrives, you miss that lottery entry entirely. Chia Network’s official documentation states plainly: “You are ineligible to win a block at any missed signage points.”

If you’re missing 100 or more signage points in a single day, something is genuinely wrong with your farm. Missing a handful per day is normal — brief network blips happen. But hitting that 100-point threshold consistently means either your harvester is overloaded (too many drives competing for CPU time) or your local network is experiencing frequent interruptions. Both are fixable once you know about them. Without an alert, you might not find out for days.

The Silent Killer: Dropped Drives and Falling Plot Counts

Hard drives disconnect without drama. A failing HDD, a loose cable, or a momentary power sag can unmount a drive instantly and silently. On a farm with dozens of drives, losing one 18TB HDD means losing every plot on it — and all those plots are now invisible to the farmer at every subsequent signage point until the drive comes back online or gets replaced.

A plot count decrease alert is one of the most valuable chia farm alerts you can configure. Tools like Chiadog watch this number continuously and fire an immediate push notification the moment your total drops below its previous value. You don’t have to open your GUI. You don’t have to run chia farm summary. Your phone tells you within seconds.

Which Chia Farm Alert Approach Is Right for Your Setup?

Not every farmer needs the same alerting stack. A solo farmer with a single machine and a handful of drives has very different needs from someone running four harvesters across a home rack. The table below maps common setups to the right approach so you can pick the one that fits and skip the rest.

The Four Critical Chia Farm Alert Types to Set Up

Alert fatigue is real. If your phone buzzes constantly, you’ll start ignoring it — which defeats the entire purpose. Focus on these four alert categories. They cover the vast majority of real farm health problems and won’t flood you with noise.

Signage Point Gap Alerts

This is your master health check. If your node hasn’t received a signage point challenge in the past 2–5 minutes, something has broken the connection between the Chia network and your farmer. It might be a sync issue, a network drop, or the farmer process crashing. Chiadog fires an alert if a harvester hasn’t participated in any challenge for 120 seconds by default — a threshold you can tune in config.yaml. One alert type, three possible root causes all caught in one shot.

Plot Lookup Time Alerts

Lookup time is one of the best early indicators of a drive problem — often showing up long before any SMART errors appear. When your harvester seeks a proof of space in a plot, that disk read should be fast. Chiadog’s daily summary specifically tracks lookups that exceed 5 seconds and 15 seconds, flagging them separately. An occasional slow lookup is nothing to worry about. Consistent lookups in the 5–15+ second range mean a drive is struggling — whether from age, fragmentation, too many concurrent reads, or early failure. Acting on this alert early is the difference between a planned drive replacement and an emergency one.

Harvester Offline Alerts

In a multi-harvester setup, each remote machine connects back to the main farmer over your local network. If that connection drops — a harvester reboots, a network switch hiccups, or a process crashes — that machine’s entire plot space goes dark. Chiadog detects this by watching for the keep-alive events that harvesters send to the farmer. If no keep-alive signal is detected for 400 seconds, you get a push notification: “Your harvester appears to be offline.” For any farm larger than a single machine, this is a non-negotiable alert to have running.

Pool Partial Stale Alerts

If you farm with a pool, your farmer continuously submits partial proofs as evidence of your contributed space. A stale partial means your node didn’t respond to the pool’s challenge within the required time window — about 28 seconds after the signage point. Occasional stale partials are expected and fine. A persistent pattern of them points to the same root causes as missed signage points: harvester overload or network latency. Most major pools surface stale partial data directly in their dashboards and mobile apps, making this a built-in alert that requires zero extra setup for pool farmers. Chia’s 2.0 GUI Farm Health tab shows this data as well, breaking pool partials into valid, stale, invalid, and missing categories.

The Best Tools for Chia Farm Alerts in 2025

Chiadog — The Community Standard

Chiadog is the most widely used chia farm alert tool in the community, and for good reason. It’s a Python-based watchdog that runs alongside your Chia node, reading your debug.log in real time and watching for specific event patterns that indicate a problem. It doesn’t require API access or any additional services — just read permissions on your log file and an internet connection to send notifications. Configuration lives in a single config.yaml file, and the installation is straightforward via the official Docker image.

One of Chiadog’s most practical features for larger farms is its ability to monitor multiple remote harvesters from a single machine, accessing their log files over SSH. You configure a separate config file per harvester, give each a unique notification prefix so you can tell them apart, and run Chiadog for each one. The project was updated as recently as December 2025, confirming it remains actively maintained. The recommended Docker setup also keeps it properly sandboxed from your main farming environment, which is good security practice.

chia-monitor — Best for Multi-Harvester and Advanced Setups

For farmers already running a monitoring stack or comfortable standing one up, chia-monitor by philippnormann is the most capable solution available. Instead of parsing log files, it pulls metrics directly from the Chia daemon via RPC and WebSocket APIs, then exports them via a Prometheus-compatible /metrics endpoint. The companion Grafana dashboard — importable directly from grafana.com using dashboard ID 14544 — gives you time-series graphs of signage points per minute, plots passing the filter, proof counts, wallet balance, current netspace, and harvester latency, all in a single visual view.

Where chia-monitor truly separates itself is the Grafana alert rule engine. You define precise alert conditions — for example, trigger if no new signage points appear for five minutes, or if average lookup times exceed your threshold for a sustained period — and route those to any channel Grafana supports, including email, Slack, PagerDuty, and Discord webhooks. For large farms or professionally managed setups, this is the monitoring approach that scales cleanly alongside other server infrastructure you may already have running.

Built-In Farm Health in the Chia 2.0+ GUI

If you run the Chia desktop GUI on version 2.0 or later, there’s no need to install anything for a basic health overview. Chia 2.0 added a dedicated Farm Health tab that surfaces sync status, plots passing the filter per signage point, missing signage points, and pooling health (partials breakdown) in a single screen. The Chia team described the intent directly in their 2.0.0 release notes: “missing signage points can signal network issues” — which is precisely why this tab exists.

The limitation is that the GUI doesn’t send push notifications. You have to open it to see the data. Think of it as your first stop for a manual health check rather than a proactive alert system. For most serious farmers, it works best alongside Chiadog or a Grafana stack rather than as a standalone solution.

farmr, Chiabot, and Chia-Tea

Farmr provides a web-based dashboard and Discord bot that reports real-time farm stats and sends alerts when blocks are found or new plots are added. It’s a natural fit for farmers who spend time in Discord communities and want farm status visible without leaving their chat client. Chiabot takes a similar Discord-first approach, sending channel messages on block wins and plot completions. Chia-Tea is a Python library aimed at developers who want to build fully custom monitoring logic with Discord notification support — it handles both single-machine and multi-machine farms and is especially useful when you need alert conditions that go beyond what packaged tools offer out of the box.

Chiadog vs. chia-monitor: Side-by-Side Comparison

How to Confirm Your Chia Farm Alerts Are Actually Working

Setting up an alert tool is not the same as confirming your alert pipeline is live end-to-end. Most farmers configure Chiadog, see no errors on startup, and assume everything is working. Don’t assume — test it. Chiadog gives you an easy way to do this: temporarily remove one of your plot directories from the configuration so that Chiadog detects a plot count drop and fires the notification. If your phone buzzes with the expected message, your entire pipeline — from the log file to the notification channel — is confirmed working. Re-add the directory, and you’re done.

For Grafana alert rules in chia-monitor, the alert rule editor includes a “Test” button that fires a test notification directly to your configured channel without waiting for a real event. Make this test part of your initial setup, not an afterthought.

One more thing: confirm your Chia log level is set to INFO. Chiadog and most log-parsing tools require INFO-level logging to access the full event stream from debug.log. At WARNING level or below, many key events — including harvester challenge responses and lookup timing entries — simply won’t be written to the log at all, leaving your monitoring tool flying blind.

Conclusion

Your plots are running 24/7, but you’re not. Chia farm alerts are what bridge that gap. Whether you use Chiadog for a simple and reliable mobile notification setup or build a full Prometheus and Grafana stack for a multi-harvester operation, the goal is identical: know within minutes when something goes wrong, not the next time you happen to open your GUI. Set your log level to INFO, pick the tool that fits your farm size and technical comfort, test your pipeline before you need it, and let your farm run with real confidence. If you want to deepen your understanding of Chia’s technical layer beyond farming, read how Chialisp is transforming what’s possible in Chia’s smart contract ecosystem.

Chia Farm Alerts FAQs

What are chia farm alerts and why do I need them?

Chia farm alerts are automated notifications that fire when your farm has a problem — such as a harvester going offline, a drive disconnecting, or a pattern of missed signage points. Without them, your farm can lose XCH rewards for hours before you notice anything is wrong, since problems don’t always surface in the GUI.

How many signage points should my chia farm receive each day?

A healthy chia farm should be receiving all 9,216 signage points broadcast by the network each day (64 per 10-minute subslot). According to Chia’s official documentation, missing 100 or more per day is a clear signal that something is wrong with your harvester or network connection.

What is the best free tool for chia farm alerts?

Chiadog is the most widely adopted free tool for chia farm alerts — it parses your debug.log file and pushes notifications to Discord, Telegram, Pushover, or email with minimal configuration. It’s actively maintained, available as a Docker image, and supports remote monitoring of multiple harvesters via SSH.

How do I get notified if a chia harvester goes offline?

Chiadog detects harvester offline events by watching for missing keep-alive signals in the debug.log — by default it fires an alert if no harvester activity is detected within 400 seconds. Pool-based monitoring also catches this indirectly, since an offline harvester immediately stops submitting partials to the pool.

What plot lookup time should trigger a chia farm alert?

Plot lookup times should consistently stay well under 5 seconds for healthy drives. Chiadog’s daily summary tracks lookups exceeding 5 seconds and 15 seconds separately — regular lookups above 5 seconds are worth investigating, and anything consistently over 15 seconds usually points to a drive under serious stress or in early stages of failure.

Chia Farm Alerts Citations

1. Chia Network. “Checking Farm Health.” Chia Documentation. https://docs.chia.net/checking-farm-health/
2. Chia Network. “Signage and Infusion Points.” Chia Documentation. https://docs.chia.net/signage-and-infusion-points/
3. martomi. “Chiadog: A Watchdog Providing Peace of Mind That Your Chia Farm Is Running Smoothly 24/7.” GitHub. https://github.com/martomi/chiadog
4. philippnormann. “chia-monitor: A Comprehensive Monitoring and Alerting Solution for the Status of Your Chia Farmer and Harvesters.” GitHub. https://github.com/philippnormann/chia-monitor
5. Chia Network Inc. “Version 2.0.0 Release.” Chia Network Blog. August 24, 2023. https://www.chia.net/2023/08/24/version-2-0-0-release/
6. Chia Network. “Pool Protocol 1.0 Specification.” Chia Documentation. https://docs.chia.net/pool-protocol-specification/