At a glance
Active Nodes (status=live) counts the CockroachDB nodes currently reporting a live liveness status to the cluster. It is the count of nodes that are heartbeating their node-liveness range and are eligible to hold leases and serve traffic. A node that has crashed, been network-partitioned, or is mid-restart drops out of this count within a few seconds, so the card is a fast, real-time pulse on how much of your cluster is actually carrying load.
What it tracks
This card reports the number of nodes whose liveness status islive at poll time. CockroachDB tracks node liveness through a dedicated heartbeat: every node periodically writes to the node-liveness range, and a node is live only while its lease on that record is valid (the default liveness duration is roughly 9 seconds). When a node stops heartbeating, it transitions to suspect and then, after the time-until-store-dead window (5 minutes by default), to dead. Active Nodes is the headcount of the live set: the nodes that can currently take on range leases, accept SQL connections, and participate in Raft quorum. A healthy steady-state value equals your provisioned node count. A dip means a node has stopped heartbeating, which precedes lease transfers, possible under-replication, and rebalancing.
Reconciling against the source
To confirm the figure natively, runSELECT node_id, is_live FROM crdb_internal.gossip_liveness ORDER BY node_id; or open the DB Console Cluster Overview, where nodes are grouped as Live, Suspect, and Dead. On CockroachDB Cloud, the same live-node count appears on the cluster’s Overview page. Brief differences are usually a node that is suspect (heartbeat just missed) rather than truly dead, so allow a few seconds for liveness to settle before treating a dip as a real node loss.