Manage your servers

Everything here lives on Settings → Servers.

What the statuses mean

Each server also shows Last reported, which is the plain fact of when we last heard from it.

Renaming a server

A server is listed under its label if it has one and its own hostname otherwise. Open the server and choose Rename to change it; clearing the field falls back to the hostname.

Only the label changes. The hostname is what the machine calls itself and is overwritten from every report, so there is nothing to edit there.

This is a display name and nothing more — it is not the machine's identity, so renaming keeps the history, the key and the thresholds exactly as they were. You do not need to reinstall the agent to fix a name.

A server going quiet

There is no "offline" status, and that is deliberate rather than missing. A server we stop hearing from can mean it died, or that the network between it and us broke. We will not claim to know which, so we show you when it last reported and leave the conclusion to you.

If you want paging on a machine being unreachable, an HTTP or TCP monitor pointed at it is the right tool: it is checked from several regions, so it can tell the difference between the machine being down and one route to it being down. The agent is inside the machine and cannot report on its own absence.

Disable

Disabling stops collection. The agent keeps checking in every few hours — on purpose, so you can switch it back on from this page rather than having to log into the box. Nothing is recorded while it is off, so expect a gap in the graphs rather than a flat line.

Disabled servers still count against your plan's allowance, because their history is still being stored. To free a slot, revoke.

Pending approval

This means two machines are reporting the same hardware identity. There are two ways that happens:

A clone. You snapshotted a server and started the copy, and both are now reporting. They are different servers and should be approved as such — approve it and it becomes its own entry with its own history.

An image baked after enrolling. If the agent enrolled before you captured the image, every machine from that image carries the same identity, and they will queue up here one after another. Fix the image: install the agent but let first boot do the enrolling.

A machine held here collects nothing until you decide. We hold rather than guess because both guesses are bad: auto-enrolling merges two servers' numbers into one graph, producing readings that make no sense and that nobody would work out the cause of; auto-revoking breaks a legitimate snapshot restore.

A restored backup is not affected. It went quiet, came back, and is recognised as the same machine.

Replacing a server

Revoke the old one and install on the new one. There is no "move" operation: the new machine is new hardware with new numbers, and gluing one history onto another would produce a graph that lies about a disk that was never that full.

If you need the old numbers, they stay on the revoked server until retention expires.

Revoke

Revoking kills the server's key immediately and permanently — there is no un-revoking, and the agent would have to enrol again. The entry and its history stay until retention expires, and the slot is freed for another server at once.

Revoking does not uninstall anything. Run the uninstaller on the machine too, or you leave a service running that can no longer do anything.

Tokens

An enrollment token is listed with its visible prefix, its use count and its expiry. There are two ways to revoke one, and the difference matters:

Revoke token stops it enrolling anything new and leaves the servers that used it alone — they have their own keys and keep reporting. This is what you want when a token might have leaked.

Revoke with its servers also revokes every server that enrolled with it, which stops them reporting immediately. Use it when the token was used to enrol machines that should not have been.

Tokens expire on their own, so the ordinary case needs no cleanup. There is no way to see a token's secret again after it is created; make a new one.

Your allowance

Every server counts except revoked ones — active, disabled and pending approval alike. Enrolling past the limit is refused with a message saying so, rather than being accepted and silently not monitored.