Digital signage monitoring

The screens list is the first thing you check

Digital signage monitoring starts with a list that tells the truth at a glance. The Screens page shows every screen with its connection status and its content status as two separate columns, with status cards across the top that double as filters. Sort by status and the screen that has been dark longest comes to the bottom, which is usually the one to look at first. Sort by content status and everything that is not showing what it should groups together, whether or not it is online. Search matches names and labels, so typing a site name lists that site.

Online and in sync are tracked independently because they fail independently. A screen that is online but not in sync is downloading, and it keeps playing what it had, so the audience sees no interruption. A screen that is offline but in sync is playing exactly the right content from its own storage, which is the point of caching content on the device. Neither state is reduced to the other.

Health checks that name the cause

A ScreenlyOS screen reports on its own hardware, and the dashboard turns that report into problems ranked by severity, each with what caused it and what to do. Power: the firmware raises an under-voltage flag when the supply dips, which crashes playback and corrupts cards, so it is treated as serious even after it recovers. Cooling: a warning above 70°C and overheating above 80°C, where the board throttles and video stutters. Storage: a warning below 3 GB free and critical below 1 GB, plus the SD card’s own error counters on a Raspberry Pi and the drive’s SMART endurance data on a Player Max. Memory above 90 percent. Connectivity, as four separate checks against the gateway, our API, your content hosts, and a time server, with a weak Wi-Fi signal flagged on its own. Clock drift, which quietly breaks schedules. And whether the device is authenticating with a certificate or a weaker shared secret.

Under the list is a line naming what still works, because a list of warnings should not read as a dead screen. Content already on the device keeps playing while you work through them.

See the wall without walking to it

The Now playing tab on a screen lists what is active on it right now, which is the fastest way to confirm a change landed or an assistant did what you meant. A diagnostic screenshot, captured from the device’s display output on ScreenlyOS, shows exactly what is on the panel, and Privacy Mode turns capture off for screens showing sensitive information. For the schedule side, the effective schedule summary on a playlist says in plain language when it will play, so a screen that went blank at 18:01 is recognized as a schedule ending rather than a fault.

Alerts, and monitoring on your own terms

An offline screen keeps playing, so nobody notices, which is why alerts matter more in signage than in systems that fail loudly. Screenly tells you when a screen goes offline by email, Slack, or PagerDuty, configured per workspace, with the timing tuned so the alerts stay worth reading. If you already run monitoring, a ScreenlyOS screen can expose its device metrics for your own tooling, and the API and CLI give you the fleet as a table: a scheduled screen list into whatever your organization already reads, or a question to an AI assistant over MCP such as which screens in the Frankfurt plant are offline.