Dear Council

We joined the Kusama Thousand Validator program two month ago with the first validator and started running our second node last week. Our operations have greatly benefited from a few open-sourced Ansible scripts published by Polkachu, an active community member. 

Our journey started with the Secure Validator setup published by W3F [https://github.com/w3f/polkadot-validator-setup](https://github.com/w3f/polkadot-validator-setup). While it is a very clearly documented repo, we found that it lacked the structure for node metrics monitoring and log watching. More importantly, since we planned to launch two KSM nodes and eventually one DOT node, it was not clear to us how to manage a cluster of nodes efficiently. 

After researching online, we discovered the git repos published by Polkachu. The main repo is an Ansible deployment script for a cluster of KSM/DOT validators: [https://github.com/polkachu/polkadot-validator](https://github.com/polkachu/polkadot-validator). It is inspired by the W3F script, but it has a nice structure for deploying a cluster of nodes, along with a few node monitoring tools such as Node Exporter, Processor Exporter, and Promtail. Moreover, it incorporates the snapshot from polkashots.io for a much faster deployment. 

It also comes with a companion Ansible deployment script for a monitoring server that manages the node metrics and logs for all validators: [https://github.com/polkachu/server-monitoring](https://github.com/polkachu/server-monitoring). Currently, our two KSM nodes send data to one monitor server, and eventually our DOT node will do the same, thanks to this script. 

Finally, while we do not use this third repo, we applaud that Polkachu also publishes its deployment script for other substrate-based chains such as Sora and Polkadex: [https://github.com/polkachu/substrate-validator](https://github.com/polkachu/substrate-validator). We might take advantage of it one day!

All these three repos are great resources for the community. We would like to propose a tip, and hope more community members benefit from these scripts as much as we do. 

Thanks







https://twitter.com/ruitao_su/status/1208305894083022848

Open-sourced Ansible deployment script of KSM/DOT validator, note monitoring and other substrate-based nodes