We manage a network of digital screens across cars, metro stations, and outdoor public spaces as part of our advertising services. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring these screens stay online, play the right content, and don’t fail during critical campaign windows.
When a screen goes dark on the field, we usually only know after someone spots it, which is obviously too late. So we started treating our signage network the same way IT teams monitor servers and network infrastructure.
Here are the key practices that worked for us:
- Ping + heartbeat monitoring for every screen endpoint
- Real-time playback logs to detect stalled content loops
- Automated alerts when a screen disconnects for more than X minutes
- A simple uptime dashboard that shows green/yellow/red screen health
- A small incident response playbook for field teams
This reduced our outage time by a noticeable margin, especially in high-traffic zones.
Question for the community:
For those who manage distributed devices or remote nodes, what’s the most reliable way you’ve found to monitor network-dependent hardware?
We’re exploring whether SNMP polling or agent-based health checks would scale better as we expand past 500+ screens.
