Reading the diagnostics panel
An instrument panel you can switch on over any screen. It answers the questions the dashboard cannot, because it reports what the screen knows rather than what the server believes.
Switching it on#
On the screen's settings, turn on Diagnostics overlay. It appears over the content on that screen within a minute. Turn it off when you are done — it is legible from across a room, which is exactly what you do not want in a shop window.
Why it existsEverything the dashboard shows about a screen is what the server was told. When a screen is misbehaving, that is precisely the thing in question. This panel is drawn by the player itself, from what it can see: whether its own connection is really up, how old the schedule driving it is, whether each file it has been told to play can actually be fetched, and whether it is holding them.
What each section tells you#
- network / hub — two different things. A screen can be online and still have no reporting connection, and it will keep playing perfectly while reading as offline in the dashboard.
- schedule — how long ago it last heard from the platform. Minutes is normal. Hours means it is running on its cached copy, which it can do for seven days.
- plays queued — reports waiting to be delivered. Non-zero while offline is expected; non-zero and growing while online is a report that cannot get through.
- sound — which of the four possible reasons for silence applies. See The sound is wrong.
- offline — how many of this schedule's files the screen is holding. This is the line that predicts whether it survives tonight.
The file table#
Every item the schedule references, with two independent answers, because they fail independently:
1Whether this device is holding the file. “held” survives an outage; “no” does not.
2Whether it can be fetched right now. A 404 here is a file that is genuinely missing.
3Ad slots and VAST have nothing to cache and nothing to fetch — decided per play at the ad server.
Example — What the two columns catch
A row reading held · 404 is a file that has been deleted from storage but is still on this screen's disk — it plays today and vanishes the moment the cache is pruned. A row reading no · 200 is a file that is fine today and will be missing the moment the line drops. Neither is visible from the dashboard.
Note
The panel also lists recent events — the last few things the player did, in its own words. When you contact support about a screen, a photograph of this panel usually answers the first three questions they would have asked.