As part of our ongoing efforts to improve the scalability of balenaCloud dashboard, fleet rendering for users managing tens of thousands of devices or more is now approximately 30 times faster. This enhancement is part of a larger initiative aimed at improving the user experience, visibility, and control over device management, especially as your fleet scales.
What We’ve Done
This update introduces several new features and improvements, including:
• Faster Fleet Rendering – Fleets of 20,000 devices or more now load up to 30 times faster, drastically improving the experience for large-scale deployments
• Updated Device Statuses – We’ve overhauled device statuses to better reflect what’s happening in real time, making it easier for users to understand the state of their devices
• New Columns on the Dashboard – We’ve added new columns to the fleet overview, namely “Update Status” and “Update Status Duration” to give more clarity around device updates and broken out “Cloudlink” and “Heartbeat” to give deeper insight into connectivity status
• Improved Filtering – We’ve removed regular expression filtering and replaced it with more intuitive “Starts With” and “Ends With” filters, and added filters by “date” and “Update status”.
What’s Changed with Device Statuses?
We’ve made several updates to device statuses to more accurately reflect what’s happening on your devices:
- Online > Operational – The old “Online” status has been replaced with “Operational” to better convey when a device is successfully connected to our services.
- Offline > Disconnected – We’ve replaced “Offline” with “Disconnected” to clarify when the communication between the device and balenaCloud has been cut off.
- New Status: Reduced Functionality – This status has been added to indicate when Cloudlink or Heartbeat services are not functioning as expected, but the device is still operational.
Enhanced Update Visibility
We know that pushing updates can be stressful, particularly when managing large fleets. To ease this, we’ve introduced additional statuses to provide more granular visibility into the update process.
You’ll now see devices go through states like:
- Downloading: The update is being downloaded to the device.
- Downloaded: The update is ready, but hasn’t been applied yet.
- Applying Changes: The update is being installed on the device.
- Done: The update has been successfully applied.
- Rejected: The target release has required services that do not meet the necessary requirements to run.
- Aborted: The supervisor has given up on trying to install a new release. There are currently no conditions under which the supervisor sets this state, but future work will allow the supervisor to abort an update, for instance, after a number of failed download tries.
These new statuses allow you to monitor where each device is in the update process and quickly identify any issues. In addition, you can now see how long a device has been in a particular update state with the “Update Status Duration” column.
Potentially Breaking Changes: What This Means for You
As with any significant update, there are some changes that may impact your current setup:
• Changes in Filtering: We’ve removed regex-based filtering, but the new filtering options (e.g. “Starts With” and “Ends With”) are designed to cover most common use cases.
• Device Views Will Need to Be Recreated: If you have custom views for sorting and viewing your devices groups, they will need to be recreated.
• Data Population Requires Supervisor Update: Data for the new “Update status” fields will only be populated once you update your devices to the latest version of the supervisor (greater than or equal to v16.7.0).
Note that these changes are only part of API v7 and SDK v20 and that older scripts won’t break or need to be changed; they will continue working with API v6 and SDK v19.
Why We’re Doing This
Over the years, our focus has been on making balenaCloud simple and intuitive to use. However, in some cases, this simplicity inadvertently reduced the visibility and clarity needed when managing large fleets. As more customers deploy fleets in the tens or 100s of thousands scale, it has become increasingly important to ensure that our platform reflects reality accurately and provides clear, actionable insights.
We are committed to improving the experience for fleet managers, particularly when it comes to speed and visibility. These changes will help our users catch issues early, improve fleet health, and ultimately provide more reliable information about device status and updates.
Looking Forward: What This Unlocks for the Future
These changes are just the beginning of a broader effort to enhance visibility and usability on balenaCloud. By improving the accuracy of device statuses and adding better performance for large fleets, we’re setting the stage for even more features that will give you greater control and insight into your fleet. Future improvements will continue to make fleet management more seamless and reliable, even as your deployments grow.
We’re confident these updates will enhance your experience on balenaCloud dashboard, especially if you’re managing large fleets. As always, we value your feedback and encourage you to share your thoughts with us as we continue to evolve and improve the platform.
— The balenaCloud Team
Stay Updated:
- For more details, visit our documentation page.
- If you have any questions or need assistance, please reach out to our team on support or the forums.
- If you have suggestion or features you would like to see, please drop us a line on our feature requests page.
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