See At A Glance Whether Your Kiosks Are Online
The most common outage at a reception desk is not a server failure. It is a tablet that quietly dropped off the wifi, in an empty lobby, and nobody found out until someone needed a list of who was in the building. SmartLobby now shows you, from our side, whether each of your kiosks is reachable.
The kiosk has always shown its own indicator. The problem with any device-side signal is obvious once you say it out loud: an offline tablet cannot raise an alarm about being offline, and there is nobody standing in front of it to look.
What you see
It appears in two places — on the Home page under each location, and on Device Settings under each device name.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Online | Heard from within the last few minutes |
| Offline | Silent for over six minutes — switched off, or lost its network |
| No signal yet | Has never reported — usually a kiosk on an older app version |
Beside the status you see how long ago the device was last heard from, so you can tell a kiosk that dropped off moments ago from one that has been down since yesterday.
Grey is not a fault. A device that has never reported shows as "No signal yet" rather than Offline on
purpose. It may be working perfectly and simply running an app version that predates this feature. Once
that tablet updates, it starts reporting and turns green.
Why it is not instant
A kiosk contacts the server about every two minutes, and a device is only called offline once its last contact is more than six minutes old. So a device you switch off appears offline four to six minutes later, depending where in its cycle it stopped.
That delay is deliberate. Calling a device offline after one missed contact would make the indicator flicker red and green over an ordinary wifi hiccup, and an indicator that cries wolf is one people learn to ignore.
Refreshing, and why there is no timer
Both pages read the status when you open them, and again when you switch back to the browser tab. They do not poll continuously — a dashboard left open all day would otherwise ask our servers for a reading nobody is looking at.
Use Refresh device status when you want to check right now. The time of the reading is shown beside the button, so you can always tell how current the answer is rather than trusting a number of unknown age.
One thing the button cannot do is make a device report sooner than its next contact. A kiosk that has just come back online may still show as offline for a minute or two.
What it does not do
Nothing is emailed or escalated. This is information on a screen, not an alerting system. Nobody is notified when a device goes offline, which is a deliberate choice rather than a missing feature — an alert nobody configured is an alert everyone mutes.
A device with no location still appears. On the Home page it is listed separately, so a kiosk can never be missing from the page simply because nobody assigned it a location.
This matters most for Roll Call and evacuation. A device that has been offline signed people in on the device, and those visits reach us only when it reconnects — so during an outage a roll-call list from the dashboard can be incomplete. Knowing which kiosk is offline tells you exactly which list to distrust.
Ready to stop finding out about a dead kiosk during a fire drill? Start your free 14-day trial →