Make Network Data More Observable

Author: Rick Staa, Livepeer Foundation

Funding Mechanism: On-chain Treasury - SPE Proposal

Submission URL: Closed

Winning Submission URL: CloudSPE: Make Network Data More Observable

Claimed By: Cloud SPE

Track Progress: Forum Updates - Discord Updates - GitHub Board

1. Purpose

Lack of trusted, network-wide performance and demand metrics makes it difficult to assess reliability, surface bottlenecks, or confidently onboard real-time AI workloads. Without clear visibility into latency, success rates, capacity, and workload behavior, Livepeer cannot demonstrate production readiness, establish meaningful Service Level Agreements (SLAs), or give builders confidence to deploy real workloads.

To advance the real-time AI vision, Livepeer must first measure what matters by establishing unified, trustworthy network observability. A shared data foundation enables consistent SLA tracking, informs scaling and incentive decisions, and gives operators, gateways, and developers a clear, objective view of network performance as demand grows.

Prior work: Builds on ecosystem research highlighting fragmented network data and the need for unified, network-wide observability.

2. Outcome

Overall success is when Livepeer has a unified, trustworthy observability foundation for real-time AI and video workloads—defined by clear metric schemas and open data pipelines that aggregate network-wide performance and demand data into a single, queryable source. Orchestrators, gateways, and the community can access consistent real-time and historical views across key metrics, enabling analysis, insight, and action. This foundation directly enables SLA scoring, informed orchestrator selection, and continuous reliability improvements as demand grows.

Key Metrics To Measure The Outcome Against:

• Unified Metrics Coverage: Number of core performance and demand metrics defined in a standardized schema and made available network-wide.

• Data Source Integration: Number of distinct network data sources integrated into a unified aggregation layer and exposed through documented access paths.

• Observability Completeness & Reliability: Defined indicators showing freshness, completeness, and consistency of network telemetry (e.g. data latency, missing dimensions, ingestion success rates).

• Reproducible Test Load Results: Availability of standardized test load execution producing repeatable, independently verifiable measurements for key SLA metrics.

3. Requirements

Must Have:

• Unified Metric Definitions: A standardized set of network performance and demand metrics, grounded in stakeholder requirements and consistently defined across the network.

• Network-Wide Aggregation: Metrics collected and aggregated across orchestrators and gateways into a single, queryable source of truth.

• Public Data Access: Documented access to aggregated network metrics that the community can independently query and validate.

• Verifiable Test Load Results: Standardized test load execution producing reproducible, independently verifiable results for key SLA metrics.

Should have:

• Entity-Level Attribution: Metrics attributable to individual orchestrators, gateways, regions, and workflows.

• Historical Coverage: Time-series data sufficient to observe trends, regressions, and improvements over time.

• Operational Signals: Clear, interpretable signals derived from metrics (including test load results) that operators can use to diagnose performance and reliability issues.

Nice to have:

• Health Thresholds: Defined thresholds or indicators that flag degraded or out-of-range network behavior.

• Comparative Baselines: Network-wide averages or benchmarks for contextualizing individual performance.

• Schema Extensibility: Metric definitions designed to evolve without breaking existing consumers.

• Example Analyses: Illustrative analyses or queries demonstrating how aggregated data can be interpreted and used.

4. Proposal Guidelines

Your proposal must include the following in your proposal. Here is a guideline for what we are looking for: Livepeer RFP — Proposal Template

• Company Overview & Capabilities

• Experience and why you are a great fit for this work

• Milestones (with funding amount, timeline, deliverables, demo day for each)

• Outcomes

• Budget & Governance (how funds will be distributed)