Dear Belena team,
In recently days, when we were provisioning the devices, the devices showed status as “Online(Heartbeat only)”. I would like to know under what kind of circumstances, the devices would show this status? And can the device provision succussfully in this status?
Hi @warren , The device is marked as Online (Heartbeat only) when the device might be connected to the internet but connected to the balena cloud. In this stage, we can’t do any action from the balena console, such as reboot, restart or open the shell.
To solve the issue, you can check if the network has any firewall that prevents the device from connecting to the balena cloud or issues on the network connection itself.
You can also find the device states here Device statuses - Balena Documentation
Hi @salmanfarisvp,
Thank you for the quick reply. Could we provision the devices successfully under this status?
We are producing the devices in China, so the internet firewall which blocks VPN may be the reason. Do you know any ways that I can quickly test the connection to Balena cloud to confirm this is the root cause?
Do you have any other Chinese customers having this issue?
Yeah, The great firewall of china might be the issue
There is a thread already discussing the situation
Hi @salmanfarisvp
Thank you for sharing this information. I will continue to find out the root cause.
At this moment, I really want to know how to judge the device provisioning successfully or not under this circumstance. Is there any indicator to indicate the success of the provisioning?
I’m not sure if there is a separate indication of device provision, but you can sideload the firmware into the device when the provision happened and that can save time on provision time.
and once the device is on the latest firmware and online status, we can confirm the device provision is successful. You can find about the large-scale provision tips here at Advanced Device Provisioning Workflow for Large Fleets: Preloading and Pre-provisioning
coping @mpous and he can add more light to this topic 
@warren did you try to preload the services on the OS image as Salman suggested? Anyway you do this, the devices will be still on Heartbeat only if you are in China, but you might see the containers running.
The solution we have for companies manufacturing in China is to run a balena Machine which is a local balenaCloud instance running in the factories. Let us know if you are interested with that.
Thanks @salmanfarisvp for helping here 
@warren Please feel free to drop me an email at joeh@balena.io to discuss balenaMachine in more detail
Hi Warren, we’ve reached out to Joe, Enpal’s account manager, to help you understand balenaMachine more. In the meantime, have a look at our overview of the product via the PDF at this link: balenaMachine On-Premises Overview.pdf - Google Drive
