Watching What the Control Plane Is Doing
Actions started from the web UI — adding a node, updating an agent, an OS update, a reboot, removing a node — run on the control plane and finish in their own time. The activity dock is where you watch them: one stream of node events and agent tasks, docked to the bottom of the window and shared by every page.
The three modes
The control sits in the sidebar, under Activity, next to the theme toggle. Your choice is remembered in the browser.
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Auto (default) | The dock opens when you start an action and shows only that action. It closes a few seconds after the action succeeds. A failure keeps it open, so the reason stays on screen. |
| Off | The dock never opens, and nothing is polled. Actions still run; you see only the confirmation toast. |
| Pinned | The dock stays open, showing everything, with filters. |
When the dock is closed it takes no space and makes no requests.
Reading the feed
Each row is either a node event (recorded by the control plane, such as deploy_started or ssh_update_failed) or an agent task (queued on a node, such as os_update or reboot), newest first. A row names the node, which links to it.
Two things the feed leaves out. Housekeeping the control plane queues on its own — status refreshes, WireGuard peer syncs, agent reconfiguration — is hidden, because it is not an action anyone took and there is a lot of it. And a task disappears from the feed once the control plane prunes it, ten minutes after it finishes; events are kept, so older history is events only.
While an action you started is being watched, the dock shows that action alone. All switches to everything, where you can narrow by node or type in the filter box. Clear forgets the finished actions.
The dock polls only while it is open, every 2 seconds while something is running and every 10 seconds otherwise, and stops entirely when the browser tab is in the background.
Per-node history
A node's page has an Events button that opens the dock filtered to that node, showing its events and tasks together. This replaces the separate event and task tables that used to sit on the page.
The same information elsewhere
The dock reads GET /v1/nodes/events and GET /v1/tasks, so everything it shows is also available from the CLI:
nimbus node events <node-id-or-ip>
nimbus task list