Developers building on the Internet Computer can now get a clearer picture of network activity than ever before. The boundary node team has announced that access logs from the network’s API Boundary Nodes are now being streamed publicly in real time. This means anyone in the community can monitor how canisters are being used across the network—live and without filters.
API Boundary Nodes (API BNs) serve as the front door to the Internet Computer. Every external request, whether it’s a query to a decentralised application or a call to a canister smart contract, passes through them. Until now, these logs weren’t available outside Dfinity. That’s changing with the rollout of the Levitron milestone.
The move allows developers, analysts, and the wider Web3 community to stream these logs directly from the nodes. There’s no need for a third-party service or data aggregator. This stream gives detailed insights into what methods are being called, the status of those calls, whether responses are coming from the cache, request and response sizes, and more. However, this doesn’t mean users are being exposed. The logs do not include IP addresses, payloads, or any identifying information. Instead, each client is represented with a salted hash that’s rotated monthly and inaccessible to outside actors. It’s a privacy-conscious way of opening access.
While there’s a lot of excitement, the release is measured in its capabilities. The logs can’t show you everything, but they can offer something previously missing: full visibility into canister queries, which are essential for understanding user interactions with dapps hosted on the Internet Computer. Until now, developers could track update calls, but queries—typically used for read-only actions—weren’t captured in a way the public could see.
That’s now changed. With real-time log streaming, developers can start understanding how their canisters are actually being used. Are the calls succeeding? Are they being cached effectively? Is there an unusual spike in activity? These are now answerable questions. And for community members keeping an eye on broader activity—whether to track popular dapps, observe usage trends, or build ranking dashboards—this direct stream removes a key blind spot.
The data comes straight from the source. API BNs now include a public endpoint that supports log streaming. Anyone can connect and begin consuming the data. Of course, if you’re looking to track patterns over time, you’ll need to store the data yourself—no historical archive is included. But the tools are there to get started right away, with full developer documentation and a sample client already made available.
There’s another layer of progress planned too. The team says SEV-SNP attestation is coming to API BNs. That would let clients verify the integrity of the logs and confirm that they’re coming from trusted hardware running verified code. It’s a technical shift, but one that matters to developers and security-minded organisations who need to trust the source of their analytics.
This release follows a broader pattern across the decentralised space, where transparency and verifiability are increasingly seen as core features, not afterthoughts. By pushing this kind of infrastructure into the open, the Internet Computer sets the groundwork for more robust analytics, better tooling, and deeper trust. Of course, it’s early days. How developers and the wider Web3 community make use of this feed remains to be seen.
But the tools are now in their hands. And that matters.
For those ready to start exploring, the documentation and open-source tools are live. The access logs are already being streamed, and developers are encouraged to build their own collectors and dashboards based on their needs.
It’s a straightforward move that adds depth to what’s happening on the Internet Computer—and for those building in public, it could change how they understand and evolve their projects.
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