Is the machine all right?
The card on your fleet, the system screen — processor, memory, disk and which chat is spending them — and a health check that answers in sentences.
Three things answer is this machine all right, at three distances.
The card on your fleet
Every machine is a card, and the card is the short answer.
A card you can press is a machine this browser can open. A card that gives you
directions instead is one it cannot, and the sentences it prints are on
when a machine will not open.
A machine that is still putting itself together reads as installing, with
the step it is on. Pressing it opens the install screen, not the panel — that
is the way back if you closed the connect tab. A machine whose first certificate is
still being issued reads as waiting, not as broken. One whose Tailscale app
is installed but switched off says so, with the command to turn it back on.
The system screen
On the machine's panel, system is what the box is doing right now:
- Processor and memory — now, and over the last while.
- Disk — how much is left, which is the one that quietly kills a machine.
- Per chat — which agents are running and what each is using.
The two failures worth watching for
Out of memory. A machine under memory pressure produces agents that behave
strangely — turns that fail for no reason, tools that die mid-run. From inside a
chat it looks like the agent having become stupid.
Out of disk. Caches, clones, build output and model caches add up faster
than you expect. A full disk breaks things in ways whose error messages point
somewhere else entirely.
Both are one glance at this screen.
What to do about it
- Mark old chats done and let their processes go.
- Clear build output and caches.
- Empty the trash if it has been thirty days of deleting.
- Or give the box more memory. It is your server, and your provider will resize
it.
Asking the machine itself
Over ssh:
beafk doctor # can a browser open this machine at all
beafk status # what is installed, who is signed in, which chats are live
beafk doctor answers in sentences rather than in a status code: is the service
up, is the clock right, can it reach the internet, is Tailscale up, does it have
an address. It changes nothing, and its output is the thing to send us.
This screen is not about money
Processor, memory and disk are what the agents cost the machine. beafk charges
per machine — see what it costs. What the agents spent in
tokens is the tile next door, usage, and the dollar bill at
Anthropic or OpenAI is still on their dashboard.
What the machine remembers about itself
Everything above is a snapshot. The machine also keeps a record — every
operation, every agent, what took how long — and that is
logs and timings.