The robotics Overview screen opens on a four-card strip: Robots, Online, Errored, and Fleet rate. Every number on that strip comes from a single ClutchCall control-plane call, fleetRobotics.kpiStrip, scoped to the current org. The same procedure backs the Fleet directory, so the two screens never disagree. This page explains what each counter counts, where it is sourced from, and what happens to the strip when the telemetry rollup cannot be reached.

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What the four counters measure

Robots is the number of robots registered to the org. It is a registry count, not a connectivity count — a robot that has never published a topic still appears here. Online is the number of robots the telemetry rollup currently considers live. See the next section. Errored is the number of robots the registry currently holds in an errored state. The card renders in the bad severity when the value is above zero, and renders plain at zero. Fleet rate is the aggregate topic publish rate across the fleet, reported in hertz. It is a rollup-derived number, so it reflects traffic that actually reached the WAN transport, not what a robot believes it is publishing locally. While the query is in flight, every card shows … rather than a zero.

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Liveness comes from telemetry, not from a heartbeat

There is no separate liveness ping for robots. A robot is online because its telemetry is arriving and being rolled up — that stream is the only liveness signal the console has. The practical consequence is that Online and Fleet rate are downstream of the same pipeline. If the rollup stops, both lose their input at the same moment, and neither one can distinguish “the fleet went quiet” from “we stopped being able to see the fleet.” That is why the console refuses to guess.

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The degraded state: unknown versus zero

When the ClickHouse rollup behind the strip is unreachable, kpiStrip returns source: 'degraded'. In that state the Overview:
  • renders Online and Fleet rate as an em dash (—), not as 0;
  • drops the ok severity from the Online card and attaches the hint Telemetry unavailable;
  • shows a banner explaining that liveness and topic rate are unknown and that the robot count below is still authoritative;
  • keeps Robots and Errored rendered as normal numbers.
Printing 0 online during an ingest outage would make a broken pipeline look like a dead fleet, which is the more expensive mistake to make at 3 a.m. An em dash means we do not know; a zero means we looked and there were none. Registry-sourced counters are unaffected by the degraded state. If you are triaging during an outage, Robots and Errored are still safe to act on. Anything sourced from the rollup is not. The Fleet directory applies the same rule, so a degraded strip on the Overview and a degraded directory are the same condition, not two separate faults.

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The errored counter

errored_robots survives the degraded state, which tells you what it is and what it is not: it is registry state, not a telemetry-derived inference. A robot counted here is recorded as errored regardless of whether its telemetry is currently flowing, and a telemetry outage will not inflate or deflate the number. The strip only gives you the count. To see which robots are errored, open the Fleet directory — it is backed by the same procedure and filters down to individual rows.

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How often the numbers refresh

The Overview polls fleetRobotics.kpiStrip every 30 seconds. There is no push channel behind the strip, so a value can be up to one polling interval stale, and recovery from the degraded state becomes visible on the next successful poll rather than immediately. The query does not run at all until an org is selected; with no org id the cards stay in their loading state.

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Where to go next when a counter looks wrong

The Overview’s second panel links the four screens that answer the follow-up questions:
  • Robots is zero, or lower than expected. Nothing is registered yet, or the robot you expected was never added. Start at the quickstart for the middleware swap and the install command, then register the robot from the Fleet directory.
  • Online is lower than Robots. Some robots are registered but their telemetry is not arriving. Open Topics to confirm the graph is publishing over the WAN rather than only on the local network.
  • Online and Fleet rate are both em dashes. This is the degraded state, not a fleet problem. Treat it as a telemetry-pipeline investigation and rely on Robots and Errored until the rollup returns.
  • Fleet rate is low but Online looks correct. Robots are connected but publishing little. Topics shows which topics are flowing; the connection-quality screen shows per-link rate and loss, which is the pair of numbers teleoperation actually depends on.
  • Errored is above zero. Open the Fleet directory to identify the specific robots; the count alone does not carry a reason.