Board

Set up an endpoint on the noc page

Why an endpoint stops answering

Built from the metrics your endpoint reports, with no configuration: noc asks it what series it has, drops the ones the monitoring system emits about itself, and picks a bounded set to draw. Either way a board describes panels and queries only — never an endpoint and never a credential, so it is safe to share. Until an endpoint is saved, this shows a board file the site ships.

The selection is not fixed. Every interval noc re-queries the panels on screen and, alongside them, a small rotating slice of the metrics it is not drawing — enough to get a reading, not enough to plot. When that rotation has been all the way round, the board reconsiders what it is showing against everything it actually measured. A metric only takes another's place if it is clearly ahead or has stayed ahead for a while: a board that swapped panels on a rounding error would be unreadable.

It also draws fewer panels rather than filling the space. A metric noc has measured and found completely still — the same value for the whole window — makes way after a couple of rounds, and nothing that is equally still takes the slot. So a board with room for eight panels may settle on three, and that is the board working rather than failing: the alternative is padding it out with flat lines, which is how a wall board teaches you to stop looking at it. A metric noc could not measure is a different case and keeps its panel — see below.

Each panel is scored in your browser for how unlike its own recent history it is behaving, and marked notable, pronounced or unusual as it stands out further. That is a hint about where to look, not a judgement about whether anything is wrong — noc has no way to know that, and it never alerts, pages or notifies. A panel whose query returns more series than it can usefully draw shows the ones that moved most and counts the rest.

The board then puts the panels in rank order and gives the leader the big slot. The slots themselves are a fixed layout — the same shape every time, whatever the scores are — so what changes from one scoring to the next is which panel is standing where, not how big anything gets. A panel noc could not score keeps the size the board file asked for and is never shuffled down for it: not measuring something is not the same as finding it quiet.

Wall mode drops the site chrome and gives the board the whole window, for a display nobody is sitting at. The controls fade out while nothing moves and come back on any pointer movement or keypress; Escape leaves. Full screen is a separate click because a browser only grants it in response to one — a kiosk-mode browser is already full screen and needs neither. Wall mode and the panel count are remembered in this browser, on this device, and are sent nowhere.