Skip to content

Monitoring and history

The service reads the status of every display on a schedule. You see the result on the overview, the wall pages and the display pages, and SiteManager records it so you can look back.

For step-by-step help, see Day-to-day care.

How often displays are read

  • A display nobody is looking at is read every 15 seconds (the --poll-idle option, from 5 seconds to 5 minutes).
  • A display that is on an open page, in a job or has just been changed is read every 2 seconds (the --poll-focused option, from 1 to 15 seconds).
  • A display that does not answer is tried less often, down to once a minute.

A display counts as offline after two missed readings. An outage is therefore noticed within about 35 seconds of the last answer, and the default alert for an offline display fires 60 seconds after it.

You can ask for faster reading yourself with sitemanager monitor focus SERIAL.... It reads those displays every 2 seconds for up to 10 minutes (120 seconds by default). sitemanager monitor polling shows how often each display is read now. Both need only the viewer role.

Status history

SiteManager records these values for each display:

  • the fraction of readings in which the display was online;
  • the VM temperature;
  • the output power of the power supply;
  • the camera and tracker frame rates;
  • tracker restarts;
  • the spread of the touch traffic and the idle baseline, which the idle-wall check uses.

It keeps three resolutions, so recent data is detailed and old data is compact:

  • 30 seconds resolution is kept for 24 hours.
  • 5 minutes resolution is kept for 30 days.
  • 1 hour resolution is kept for 366 days.

The history takes about 2.6 MB per display and is stored in the history folder of the state directory. It records at most 128 displays (the --history-max-displays option). Removing a display from the site keeps its history. See Removed displays.

Removed displays

When you remove a display from the site, SiteManager keeps its history. If you add the same serial number again, the history carries on. Until then you can read it by serial number: open the history page of the removed display, run sitemanager history SERIAL, or call the API. A removed display still counts toward the limit of 128 recorded displays. A page that lists History kept for removed displays shows which serial numbers are kept, and sitemanager history --removed lists them.

An administrator can delete the history of a removed display for good. On its history page, select Delete this display's history and confirm. From the command line, run sitemanager history SERIAL --delete. Each delete is written to the audit log as history.delete. A delete is refused while the display is still in the site.

Charts

Open History… on a display page, or History… on a wall page. Choose a range at the top: 1h, 6h, 24h, 7d, 30d or 1y. The display page shows one chart for each value. The wall page shows one value for all displays of the wall, and you choose the value with the tabs. A gap in a line is time with no reading. Charts update by themselves every 30 seconds.

Under the charts, Download as CSV saves the data of one display. The same data is available from the command line:

sitemanager history R0000001A --range 7d
sitemanager history R0000001A --csv --range 30d
sitemanager history --wall "Lobby wall" --metric temperature

See Command reference for the metric names.

The idle-wall check

Rebooting, calibrating and updating firmware disturb a wall. Before such a job, SiteManager asks whether anyone is using the wall. If the wall looks in use, or SiteManager cannot tell, the job waits for your go-ahead. Unknown is never treated as idle.

SiteManager cannot see touches directly, but it can see traffic. Each display sends a steady touch stream to the application on the wall computer (port 5502), and touches add to it. SiteManager reads the byte counters of those connections on the wall computer, on Linux and Windows. It reads only counters, not the data. On other systems, such as macOS, the answer is always "unknown".

Because every display's quiet rate is a little different, SiteManager compares each display with its own recent quiet periods:

  • Every 5 minutes the service records each display's touch traffic rate in the history. The baseline is the lower quarter of the last 12 of those samples, with at least 3 needed.
  • A display is busy when its traffic is above its baseline plus a margin. The margin is the larger of 50 percent of the baseline and 20 KB per second.
  • A display with no baseline yet, such as a new display or a computer that cannot read the counters, is busy when one of its connections varies by more than 1000 bytes per second.
  • A connection that was restarted counts as busy. A display with no connection makes the whole answer "unknown".

A wall in constant use for the last two hours calibrates high, so the first hours after you add a busy wall are the least strict.

The options --activity-every, --idle-interval, --idle-samples, --idle-tolerance, --idle-margin-percent and --idle-margin-floor tune this. See sitemanagerd reference.

You can ask for the verdict yourself with sitemanager idle. It exits with 0 only when the wall is idle, so a script can wait for it.

Note

The service must run on the computer that holds the connections to the displays, not in a container with its own network. In a container it sees only its own connections and reports that the application is not running.