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 impact, or it didn't happen.
A game server can be busy, noisy, and inefficient under the covers — and if no player ever feels it, that is not a problem, and the dot stays green. Every signal behind the dot is anchored to something a player can perceive, and nothing counts unless players were actually online to feel it. An empty server cannot have a performance event.
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. Players are being affected right now: the server is running slower than its own normal, players are hitting repeated freezes, players are saying it in chat, or network trouble is hitting several of your servers at once.
- 🔴 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". A lone hitch is logged by nobody; the burst is the 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. Two independent server processes don't degrade in unison unless the path between players and servers did — this one points at the hosting or transit layer, not at anything you can fix in a config.
- 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 that re-reads exactly the window the event covers — leading with what players felt, then what the evidence says about where the problem sat, and only then 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 an event unless players feel it.
- 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. Health lists the recent events as one-line headlines; each headline opens its report; every report links into Diagnostics, where the full instruments live — charts scoped to the event's exact time window, grouped by the question they answer. If you run more than one server, the same event on a sibling server is cross-referenced, because "it happened on both at once" is itself 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.