Skip to main content

A machine has no metrics

The machine is in the console, possibly online, but its CPU, memory, or disk are blank.

First: is this actually a problem?​

Often not. Two normal explanations account for most cases.

Metrics only stream while you are looking. A machine whose card is not on screen is not sending. Open its page or scroll its card into view and current values arrive within a few seconds.

Some fields are never collected yet. GPU, network adapters, WAN IP, and geolocation are reported empty by design — the agent does not gather them. They will stay blank no matter what you do. See What the agent collects.

So: blank GPU is expected. Blank CPU on a machine you are looking at is not.

Has it ever reported?​

The Overview page's fleet health tile separates these:

  • No metrics — connected, never sent telemetry.
  • Not enrolled — never finished enrolling.

A machine in no metrics connected successfully but nothing arrived after that, which is the interesting case.

Is the agent actually connected?​

Check its log. An agent that enrolled but cannot connect to the broker will show connection errors — check WT_BROKER_URL, and see Machine shows offline.

Is the interval absurd?​

WT_METRICS_INTERVAL_MS sets the sampling interval in milliseconds. Setting it to a value meant as seconds — 300 intending five minutes — gives you a very fast agent, not a slow one. Setting it to something enormous gives you a machine that appears to send nothing.

Values below 100 are raised to 100.

Does the agent have permission to read what it reports?​

Session collection in particular needs access to the platform's session APIs. An agent running as an unprivileged service account may report an empty session list while everything else works.

If sessions are the only empty field on Linux or Windows, this is the likely cause. On macOS, session collection is not implemented at all and empty is correct.

Values look stale rather than missing​

The console shows the last known values for a machine nobody is watching, which is why a card can show numbers that are hours old. That is the design — one snapshot is stored when the agent connects, so an unwatched machine shows something rather than nothing.

Open the machine to get live values.

Disk missing but everything else present​

Disk collection filters to real mounted volumes. Network shares, virtual filesystems, and container overlay mounts are deliberately excluded, so a machine whose storage is entirely on such mounts can report no disks while reporting everything else correctly.

Still nothing​

Email support@watchtower.page with the agent's log output, the machine's name, and the platform it runs on.