Devices not showing up in Balena cloud fleet dashboard

Product support balenaOS
1

Hello,

It seems some iot-gate-imx8 devices which were visible in fleet dashboard previously somehow are not showing up (device entry doesn’t exist anymore so it’s not offline/online). Devices have connectivity as we can see them reporting to our cloud. So we are just trying to debug how device can disappear from fleet dashboard. We use below method to provision new devices.

  1. Flash iot-gate-imx8 image on USB with Balena Etcher. We re-use this USB to flash more devices. This seems to be supported workflow as base config.json doesn’t have uuid so likely there won’t be uuid collision.
  2. Plug USB into iot-gate-imx8 and let it update internal eMMC.
  3. New iot-gate-imx8 is visible on our development fleet dashboard where we configure and test it.
  4. Move device in #3 to our production fleet. Here we see some devices disappear even though they were visible for some time.

Regards,
-Niranjan

2

Just wanted to mention that ‘apiKey’ is part of config.json so un-sure if that is causing some conflict when same USB image with config.json is used to flash multiple iot-gate-imx8 boards. Each time I simply download config.json file only option then apiKey is different.

if this is the issue then is there any way we can use same USB to flash multiple iot-gate-imx8 as updating config.json for each new devices seems time consuming.

4

hi there,

are you downloading your OS images to flash to your devices via the dashboard? I.e click add device, download image etc?

If so, you should be able to use that same image - and by extension the USB key that you have flashed with it, to provision multiple devices. The fact that the devices appear in your development fleet, without disappearing, confirms this in my opinion. The method you described to provision your devices sounds correct.

So the question - why does the device not exist anymore -
this is very bizzare. I’m not sure how this could be possible, short of deleting the devices from balena cloud.

I will try to ask the team on our side, if there’s a way they can check what has happened - do you have the uuid’s of any devices that dissappeared?