Devices and data quality

Reference

What a device is

A device is the small computer Bon installs at a store, connected to one or more cameras. It counts people on the device itself and sends only the counts to Bon. No video or images are sent to the console; the only pictures you see are reference snapshots used to draw zones.

Online and offline

A device is online when the console has received data from it within the last five minutes. Otherwise it is offline. The rule is the same everywhere: the store page, the Devices page, the Overview and the administration pages.

Offline usually means one of:

• the device has no power or has been unplugged;
• the store’s internet connection is down;
• the camera feed stopped.

What an outage does to your numbers

While a device is offline, nothing it would have counted is recorded. In the console:

• the store shows an offline device alert and an offline icon in the store list;
• the Overview lists the store under Offline Devices with the outage length and an estimated visits lost, based on the store’s recent average for those hours;
• footfall, live count and zone charts for the period are incomplete.

If the device only lost its internet connection, it keeps counting locally and sends the backlog when it reconnects, for up to about two days. In that case the missing hours fill in later.

Offline devices are also tracked by Bon’s own monitoring; you do not need to report a short outage. Report an outage that lasts more than a day, or a device that goes offline repeatedly, to info@bonintel.com with the device ID.

Uptime

The Devices page shows a 30-day uptime strip and percentage for each device. Uptime counts only the time a device was activated by Bon, so days before installation are not held against it. Each day is marked as:

• reporting: data was received;
• no data (red): the device was activated but nothing arrived;
• not activated (muted): the device was not yet in service;
• partial: the device was activated for part of the day.

Summaries are produced once a day, so the most recent cell may be a day behind.

Live count drift

Live count is entries minus exits. If a camera misses an event, the figure drifts over the day and corrects itself at midnight. Bon can reset it on request.