FAQ

Common PulseNode questions — performance cost, privacy, offline servers, Spark, plans and troubleshooting.

PulseNode v5.0.2Paper · Spigot1.21 – 1.21.x

Does the plugin slow my server down?

No meaningfully. It builds one JSON snapshot every 30 seconds and posts it asynchronously — the network call never touches the main thread.

The two things that cost anything are per-world entity and chunk counting, which is a walk over data the server already holds, and per-plugin CPU, which is Spark's work rather than PulseNode's.

If you are worried, raise interval to 60 and compare. On a normal server there is nothing to see.

The dashboard shows no data

Three checks, in order:

BASH

/pn status

Is the API key set? A placeholder key is the most common cause by a wide margin.
When was the last successful post? If it is old, the server cannot reach pulsenode.tech — allow outbound HTTPS on port 443.
Did you reload? /pn reload after pasting the key. No restart needed.

Can I use one API key for several servers?

No. A key identifies one server. Share it and both servers post into the same dashboard entry, which makes every chart meaningless — you get the sum of two servers' entity counts and the average of two unrelated TPS values.

Add each server separately and give each its own key.

What data leaves my server?

Metrics, lag snapshots, captured SEVERE console lines, security events, and periodic snapshots of plugin and server configuration.

Secrets are stripped in the plugin, before anything is sent. Keys matching password, secret, token, key, api-key, credentials, auth, mysql, database, jdbc, connection-string, webhook and license are redacted. Your database password never leaves the machine.

No world data, no chat, no player inventories.

Does it work without internet access?

No. The plugin posts to the API — that is the whole architecture. A server with no outbound internet access cannot use PulseNode.

Do I need Spark?

Not required, strongly recommended. Without it, per-plugin CPU numbers are estimates; with it they are measurements, and "which plugin is eating your tick" is the most actionable line a report can contain.

YAML

track-plugins: true

Is the free plan actually usable?

Yes, for one server. You get weekly reports, 7 days of history, lag snapshots, player correlation, AI tips, the Discord bot and 10 alerts a day. The limits that bite are history depth and the single server.

What is MSPT and why do you keep mentioning it?

Milliseconds per tick — how much of the 50ms tick budget the server actually spends. TPS caps at 20, so a server at 20 TPS and 45 MSPT looks perfect and is one busy moment from dropping. MSPT is the number that warns you first.

Invoices. German invoicing law requires name and address on the document, so PulseNode collects them at signup rather than interrupting you at the point of upgrade. The free plan asks for the same reason.

Can I self-host it?

No — PulseNode is a hosted service: the plugin, the API, the dashboard and the report pipeline are one system. If a self-hosted, no-cloud tool is what you need, Argus is built that way, though it monitors staff behaviour rather than performance.

How accurate are the AI tips?

The facts in a report come from your data deterministically — the pattern detection is ordinary time-series analysis, not a model. What is generated is the wording, the prioritisation and the recommendation.

So the numbers are reliable and the advice is a well-informed suggestion. Read a tip before applying it; it does not know about your plans or the event you ran last weekend.

Alerts fire constantly

Your critical-tps is set above your server's normal floor. If you live at 17 TPS all evening, a threshold of 15 fires all evening. Set it slightly below your actual floor so an alert means something.