Skip to main content
My Devices in Device Manager

Add and configurate your devices ⏲️ in your tenant

Serena Santamaria avatar
Written by Serena Santamaria
Updated over a week ago

Table of Contents

Introduction

My Devices is the first option on the left vertical menu in Device Manager. Here you can add, modify or delete devices; start and pause them, and run specific functions for them. You can also check the list of the activities performed in a specific device and take actions on them. Proceed with the article to learn how 😉
​


The My Devices screen is divided into three sections:

  1. My Devices' section

  2. Additional Info's section

  3. Activity's section
    ​

My Devices

In the 'My Devices' section you can create new devices, which will be displayed as cards. You'll be able to see all the existing devices under your tenant (the devices for all your companies) and take limited actions for them.

You can also group your device cards by: Work Zone, or Location; that's how they will be displayed in the page.

The device card functions 🎛️

Each device card is provided with four buttons to perform a short list of actions:

Play (it shows if the device is currently paused)

If people punched in and out from the device while it was paused, once you click on the Play button you will be informed that there are pending activities that have not been processed yet. You will be asked if you want to process those pending activities or to discard them: click Yes or No to proceed accordingly.

Pause (it shows if the device is currently in play mode)

If the device is paused, people will still be able to punch through the device itself, however the activities won't be processed right away. In other words, activities such as clockings, will not be looked for and displayed in Attendance while the device is paused.

🗒️ Note: This ☝️ does not mean that clockings are lost if punches are performed, but that they are simply stored only within the physical device waiting to be synchronised with Indigo, once the device will be resumed to play mode.

Modify

You can modify the device by clicking on the pencil icon to access the 'Edit Device' window.
​


Here you can:

  • Rename your device

  • Change its Location (according to those created in Indigo)

  • Set an in interval of days when the device should automatically reboot (e.g. your device screen is risking to burn if it stays turned on for too long, so every let's say 4 days the device will reboot to prevent this from happening)

  • Set the device as an 'Access Control Device' using the respective toggle button

Once you are done with the modifications, just click on Update.

Delete

This button allows to fully delete the device from Device Manager along with the related activities and data depending on the status of the activity. Learn more about activities 👉 here.
​

⚠️ Be careful 👀
​
​Part 1: Activities are displayed as lines and you can consider them as 'virtual containers' for your data ('content'). In Device Manager, a 'content' (data) is always linked to a 'container' (activity).
Note that the Activities ('container') can be in different statuses ('Pending', 'In Progress', 'Failed' and 'Success') at the device deletion.
​
​Part 2: When deleting a device we usually delete the 'container' (activity) and its 'content' (data), however this might not apply depending on the Status of the 'container' (activity).

  • For 'Pending', 'Fail' and 'In Progress' Statuses: both the 'container' (activity) and the 'content' (data) are deleted when deleting the device.

  • For 'Success' Status: only the container (activity) is deleted, the 'content' (data) is preserved in Indigo.


This happens because when an activity is in 'Success' status, it means that the data have been processed and stored in Indigo already.
​
​Example: In case you have punches (your data), they will remain available in the system if the related activity lines for those punches are in 'Success' status. Thus, the activity ('container') lines will be deleted, but the data ('content') will remain available in the system (e.g. Indigo Attendance module). The same applies to biometrics.
​

💡 Tip

Activate Enable Access Control Device toggle for an existing device or when creating a new one in My Devices, if you want the device to purely track who accessed your facility and when. ⚠️ This means that punches won't be recorded nor available for attendance purposes.
​

For an overview of access events, you can run the Device Access Control Audit report. Learn more about it👉 here.

The device card look 👗

A miniature image of the device along with its model (e.g. SpeedFace V4L) are visible on the left top part of the card.


On the bottom part, you can see how long the device has been 'Online' or 'Offline' (plugged 🔌 and connected to the network 📶 or not) for, and whether this is a 'Clocking' device or an 'Access Control Device' {link to Access Control Article}.

🗒️ Note: When the device is in pause mode, the whole card is greyed out along with its buttons. On the other hand, if it's set to play mode, the card will be displayed in colour (se images above)

'Add a new Device' button

If you click on this blue button on the bottom right corner of the My Devices section, a new page will open. Here you will be able to follow a three-step procedure to create a new device.

Step 1: Select Device

In this page, you need to name your device, specify its Serial Number, add a Description (something to helps you identify the device, e.g. South Entrance), and a Location. Then select the 'Device Type' among the miniatures shown in the respective section (e.g. SpeedFace V4L or V5L etc).
Further down the page, there are two toggle buttons:

  • The first is to decide whether to enable the device upon creation or not

  • The second is set the device as an Access Control only device

⚠️ Important: The device won't be able to communicate with Indigo if you do not accurately insert its Serial Number.

Once ready, click on Next.

ℹ️ Info 1: If you don't see your device in the list please contact the support
ℹ️ Info 2: If the 'Enable Access Control Device' mode is on, the device will no longer be considered for attendance purposes.

Step 2: Link Device

Here can decide whether to link your device to a Work Zone or not, by clicking on the cards displayed. Click on Next.

🤔 Remember
​
Work Zones have to be created prior to the device creation.
1 Device can only be linked to a single Work Zone.


Step 3: Device Selected

A summary of the previous steps is shown in this page. If everything looks right to you, go ahead and click on Submit. You can always divert to the previous step by clicking on the Back button.

💡 Tip
If you realise that you you did not select the proper Work Zone, you can modify it in the Work Zones page, under the 'Linked Devices' tab. Click here to learn 📖 more about it. {link to the article}

Additional Info​

If you single click on a device in the 'My Devices' section, a summary of the device's details will show in the Additional Info section right below. You will see information such as:

  • Serial Number (inserted at the device creation)

  • IP Address

  • Status (Active: the device is in play mode; Inactive: the device is in pause mode)

  • Linked Work Zone

  • Location

  • Last Poll (the last time the device collected, sent and received data as a result of being plugged and connected to the network)

  • Supported Biometrics (the palm, badge, face, fingerprint and password icons will be green if supported by the device)

  • Supported biometrics' Version: if device A and device B support the same biometrics, I can share biometrics data between the two. However, if the Version of the biometrics do not match in both devices, the bio data will result as successfully shared but won't work when attempting to access.
    ​

🧠 Pro-tip: If there are three devices under the same Work Zone, and all of them support the same biometric types; only in such scenario, when you record biometrics in one device, the other devices will also record the biometrics as the devices are synchronised.

Functions dropdown

On the top right corner of the Additional Information section, you'll find the Functions dropdown menu. The menu displays a list of commands we can send to the device. For every command send, an activity line is created.

🤔 Remember
​
Whenever triggering an action from this menu, an activity line will be created in the Activity section right below the Additional Info.

Reboot Device

It sends a command to the device to restart itself. Once you single click on a device card in the My Devices section, and then click on the Reboot Device function, the reboot will be triggered and an 'Outgoing Reboot Device' activity line is created in the Activity section.
​

Send Data

It allows you to select the users we want to send to the device who can be filtered by biometrics (e.g. Face) as long as they are under the same Work Zone as the device one.

You can scroll through the list of users, filter the columns, or specifically look for users using the search box. Tick the needed users and click on Send.
An 'Outgoing User' activity line for this action will be created in the Activity section.


The User is officially in the device when the status changes to 'Successful'.

💡 Tip: This option might be useful if the previously recorded biometrics get corrupted and don't work properly on the device thus you want to push them again and perform an hard refresh.

Import Users

In this case, we want the device to import the filtered users' biometrics to Indigo. You can either tick select the users you want to import from the list, search them in the search box or you can toggle on the Retrieve all user data button. The grid will disappear from the window and when clicking on Next, it will send all the users in the device along with all their biometrics.


Once you click on Next, another window will show allowing you to type and insert ➕ the device user id of those users who are not yet recorded in Device Manager but only on the device. Click Next and Send to confirm your selection and send the data.

In the Activity section, two Outgoing activity line types will be created first: one that reflects the User Info retrieve request and the other for the BioData (if palm, face, password and fingerprint are available for that user, then four BioData lines will be created).
​

Once the above activities will change from 'Pending' to 'Success' status, then other two Incoming activity line types will be created: one for User and one for Biometric
​

Get Device Info

It is a command that forces the device to provide you with updated info for the selected device, such as:
​

'Serial Number'

'IP address'
'Supported Biometrics'

'Biometric Versions'

etc.
​
The activity line created for this action would be a '{ } Command' one (see below)
​

You can consult the answer from the device by clicking on the ℹ️ button.

Import Clockings

Sometimes the device is still working but there is a problem with the network which impedes the device to send the clockings for the day to Indigo. Once the network will be restored you can ask the device to import to Indigo:
​

  • All the clockings available in the device
    ​
    To achieve this, simply leave all the fields empty and click on Get Clockings

  • All the missing clockings for a specific date range and time frame
    ​
    So, let's say that you had a full day network issue on day 'x'. Clockings haven't been extracted by the device nor sent to Indigo. To hard push those missing clockings into Indigo, you will have to insert that in both the Start Date and End Date, insert the Start Time (00:00) and End Time (23:59) to cover the full day and click on Get Clockings.


    Once done, 2 activity lines gets created in the Activity grid:
    ​
    One Outgoing 'Command': a request to the device to provide the clockings.
    ​

    One Incoming 'Clocking': the device answers by pushing clockings into Indigo.
    ​

You can consult which users' clockings have been imported by clicking on the Info button ℹ️ and reading through the 'Request Body'.

🧠 Pro-tip

This is a part of the Request Body ℹ️ for the 'Clocking' activity above. The first four elements are pretty much the most useful for you.

1 = User's ID in the device

2024-03-27 = Date when the activity was generated

09:08:48 = Time when the activity was generated

255 = Punch State ID, which is the number you set (for Clock-In or Out; Break-In or Out) in Device Manager Settings for your company or Work Zone {link to article for Settings}

Clear Data (it clears all the users, the biometrics and the clockings from the device)
​

🗒️ Note

  • 'Update Device Wallpaper' and 'Update Device Screensavers' are visible only for the 'SpeedFace V4L' device. Learn more on how to use these settings here.

  • 'Send BG Verify Command' is visible only for 'SpeedFace V4L', 'SpeedFace V5L' and 'Pro Face X' devices. This is because in order to clock in and out in such devices, an option needs to be selected; if the option is missing you can have it showing again by clicking on this function on Device Manager.

Activity

In the Activity section it is possible to consult the list of the activities processed by the device. If for example we send data to the device via the 'Send Data' function, a line will appear in the grid.
​

In the grid there are seven columns which will help you identify several aspects of the activities such as:

Activity code (an automatically generated id for that specific activity)
​Created On (the date and time when the activity has been created)

Type

As we have learnt when speaking of 'Functions' in the Additional Info section, whenever an action is taken from Device Manager, an Activity line is generated. Below all the available Activity Types.

  • Update Device Wallpaper (when updating the wallpaper in Speedface V4L)

  • Delete Biometric (when biometrics are deleted)

  • Clocking (for imported clockings in Indigo)

  • Delete User (when we delete a device user from Device Manager)

  • Command (when making a request to the device)

  • Get User Info (when asking for the device info)

  • Get Bio Data (when requesting for biometrics to the device)

  • Reboot Device (when asking the device to restart)

  • User (for imported device users in Device Manager)

  • Biometric (for imported biometrics in Indigo)

  • Clear Data (when clearing data from the device)

Direction

Outgoing: activity coming out from Indigo to the device.
​

For example, someone recorded the biometrics on a device and they were stored on Indigo. Then, you want to push those biometrics into another device. In such case, an Outgoing activity will be generated.

Incoming: activity coming from the device to Indigo

When you record biometrics in a device and then they are processed to be recorded in Indigo, in this case an Incoming activity is generated.

Status

When an activity is launched, it goes through different statuses:

  • 'Pending' ⌛: the activity is not yet processed at all and it is waiting for the device to process it. In other words, that is not yet visible in Indigo (outgoing) or in the device (incoming).

  • 'In Progress' ⚗️ : the device has taken the activity but it is still being processed accordingly

  • 'Success' ✅ : the activity has been processed successfully

  • 'Fail' ⚠️: something happened during the process. A small description of what went wrong will show under the 'Reason' column.
    ​

🗒️ Note: The activities in 'Success' status are automatically deleted after 30 days for storage purposes.

Reason (it displays a short error summary if an activity fails)

Action buttons

  • Information button ℹ️ : It shows the 'Request Body' that was sent to the device. In other words it displays the 'language code' used by the device to process the activity. Along with it, a summary of the activity details are displayed on the left the the window.
    ​

Error button❗: (red if there is an error message and it becomes clickable, otherwise it shows as greyed out):
​

When you click on this button, a window pops up providing further details about the occurred error that cannot be displayed in the Reason column.

🧠 Pro-tip


When you click on the Error button, it's also possible to consult the specific details of the error code along with the error message. This will help both the techs and users learn more about what is going wrong.
​

For example, if the error '-30' is displayed, it means that the Biometric is not compatible with the device, thus you might want to check this aspect and import the proper biometrics according to the device type.

  • Reprocess activity button 🔄


    Why does an activity eventually need to be reprocessed?
    ​
    If, for example, an employee is not set as an Attendance employee, when the person will clock-in, the activity will fail as the employee is not an Attendance employee in Indigo. At this point you would have to set the employee as an Attendance one, go to the activity and reprocess the same clocking activity.

  • Delete Activity button 🗑️
    ​
    You might want to delete an activity if you realise that you triggered a wrong one but it is still in 'Pending' status, thus it has not been pushed to Indigo or the device yet. At this point, you delete the activity and trigger a new one with the needed corrections.


​
​


​

Did this answer your question?