Skip Rates: What Your Dashboard Is Actually Telling You
A skip is a missed slot opportunity. Not every blip warrants a midnight restart — we teach operators to correlate skips with ledger write latency and shred fetch delays before changing configs.
In Network Health Clinic sessions, we often find peer count drift after firewall updates. Restoring outbound UDP ranges fixes skip clusters that looked like CPU problems at first glance.
We maintain a simple worksheet: log the skip window, check disk metrics, check gossip peers, check for recent software upgrades. Only then consider snapshot reset.
Educational note: skip-rate targets published by third parties vary by stake weight and geography. Treat them as conversation starters, not pass-fail grades.