Balena dashboard on RPi 3 b+ always shows CPU at 100%

Product support
1

Hi there,

I have a project with several containers running on different Raspberry Pi 3B+.
I use balena version balenaOS 2.95.3+rev1.
Everything is working fine, but the balena dashboard always shows a CPU usage of 100%.
If I ssh in the different containers or even the host OS and run the command “top” it shows the CPU usage is around 1% (or 0% depending on the container).
The CPU, memory and temperature data don’t really seem to update either.

I have found this old topic that seem to discuss the same problem on other type of boards, but it has apparently been solved.
Could this be a bug as well ?

Thanks a lot for your help and don’t hesitate to ask for more info or details.

Best regards,

Thomas

3

Hello Thomas,
The dashboard metrics are not real time and can take as long as 10 minutes to update. However, we do have some known issues with CPU reporting, which we are tracking on this GitHub issue: balenaCloud CPU Usage metric not updating as expected · Issue #1907 · balena-os/balena-supervisor · GitHub . I’m just curious if you are seeing this on multiple devices, and if so, are they all on the same network?

4

Hi Alan,
Thanks for your quick answer !
The GitHub issue you linked me to seems to partially explain the jittery behavior, but not really the huge difference in values reported.

Regarding the number of devices, I currently have two fleets that are similar in architecture with 5 devices on each fleet, and they all have the same issue. I am still in the testing phase, but some devices are running for several days straight and still report very high CPU usage, while the “top” command only shows values between 1 - 3%.

It is not a problem for my development, but still rather curious.
I will follow the GitHub issue.

Thanks again !

5

You’re welcome Thomas! Regarding the difference between values from top vs. the dashboard (which ultimately gets its readings from the systeminformation NPM package), here is more detail that may be helpful: Data is not accurate · Issue #60 · sebhildebrandt/systeminformation · GitHub

7

Hi, the issue of obsolete CPU usage displayed in the balenaCloud dashboard has been resolved with Supervisor version 14.4.1. See the link below for upgrade instructions. This version ensures that the device and balenaCloud are synchronized on all metrics data displayed in the dashboard. The refresh rate for metrics values generally is 5 minutes, unless a state change like restarting or updating services happens sooner.
–Ken