Reading the Health Dot
Every server page on dayz.fyi carries a small colored dot on the Health tab. This page is the contract behind that dot: what each color means, what counts as a performance event, and — just as important — what the dot deliberately does not do. Your own server's Health page carries the same legend with the exact figures used for your server.
The one rule everything is built on
Player relevance, backed by evidence.
A game server can be busy, noisy, and inefficient under the covers — and if no player is online, there is no player-impact event to report. The dot gives priority to interruptions measured while players were present. Presence is possible exposure, though: it does not prove which players felt an interruption or how severely.
The reverse also holds: green is earned by data, never by absence of data. If we cannot see your server, we say so — we never show a healthy color just because nothing reported in.
The four colors
- 🟢 Green — normal. Data is current and no performance event is open right now.
- 🟡 Yellow — degraded. The Health instruments have an open performance event: sustained slowdown, repeated freezes, several player reports, or a shared network-shaped disturbance. It records what was observed; it does not identify a cause by itself.
- 🔴 Red — failing. The server crashed this session, is stuck restarting over and over, or crashed and hasn't come back.
- ⚪ Gray — not reporting. No live data is arriving. We can't see the server, so we won't claim it's fine. Gray is never a diagnosis of the server itself — it means the instrument is dark.
When more than one applies, the worse condition wins: red over gray, gray over yellow.
What counts as a performance event
The dot is driven by a small set of typed events, each with an objective open/close definition. In plain words:
- Running slower than normal — the server has been sustainedly slow, with players on, for long enough that it isn't a blip. "Normal" here means this server's own usual speed: every server is judged only against its own baseline.
- Repeated freezes — several moments in a short span where a single server frame ran long enough for players to feel the game pause: the hitch, the "one-second freeze". Health opens an event for a burst. Diagnostics can still show an isolated observed hitch without claiming it was a Health event.
- Players reporting lag — several different players saying lag-words in game chat in a short window. Players are an instrument too, and an honest one: when many independent people say it at once, that carries weight even if nothing else has tripped yet.
- Network trouble across your servers — several of your servers showing the same network-shaped disturbance at the same time (players' connections degrading together, telemetry cutting and resuming without a restart) while the game simulations themselves stay healthy. Shared timing points the investigation toward a common dependency, hosting, or transit path; it does not prove which mechanism caused it.
- Crashed — the server stopped mid-play without the orderly wind-down a scheduled restart has, or is restarting in a loop.
- Not reporting — the live data stream stopped and hasn't come back.
Each event on your Health page links to a report with the event's labeled report window. It uses the available evidence for that window; if it is unavailable, the stored episode is retained and the report says so. It leads with what was observed, then the measured evidence and what remains unknown, followed by any interim mitigation.
What the dot deliberately does not do
- It never compares your server to anyone else's. Speed baselines depend on hardware, map, mod set, and configuration, so "slower than normal" is always measured against your own history. There is no cross-server leaderboard hiding inside the dot.
- It doesn't light up for internal noise. High activity, big worlds, busy schedules — none of that is a performance event without a measured player-relevant interruption.
- It doesn't treat a quiet complaint channel as proof of health, and it doesn't treat a player's normal ping as proof either — a server can be struggling while ping readouts look fine, which is exactly why the dot reads the server's own frame record rather than ping.
- It doesn't guess. When an instrument couldn't see a window (chat unavailable, telemetry dark), the page says what it couldn't measure instead of showing zeros.
Where to go from the dot
The dot is a summons, not a verdict. Responsive now is the current green Health state. This restart is a separate, restart-scoped record of observations, including findings that have recovered earlier in the selected cycle. Open a finding for its detail, then choose Explore measurements to inspect the relevant instruments. Explore can show the selected restart or event, and it also has independent latest and historical views; a historical curve is context, not a measurement of the current restart or event window. The detail labels distinguish an observed interruption, a measured lead, and a cause that is not yet identified.
Health lists recent events as one-line headlines, and each headline opens its report. The report re-reads its event window and can link to the matching Diagnostics view. If you run more than one server, a same-time event on a sibling server is useful context, but still needs its own evidence.
The precise numbers behind these definitions — how long "sustained" is, how many freezes make a burst, how many players make a chorus — are shown on your own server's Health page, filled in with your server's baselines. The definitions are identical for every server; the baselines are yours alone.