SkieWhat are the online and silent shares in Insights?
Online share is the portion of your devices that have reported recently; silent share is the portion that have not reported within the limit. They are two sides of the same measure and depend on the thresholds you set, so tuning those thresholds changes what the figures mean in your organisation.
A device you cannot hear from is a device you cannot manage live. These two figures tell you how much of your fleet is in each camp at a glance.
Online means the device has reported within its limit. Silent means it has gone longer than the limit. Both come from last-seen times, which in turn come from the regular presence report about every four minutes, syncs when the network returns, and location reports. The limits are the Due, Overdue and Offline unusual thresholds, which you can edit, along with the sync interval.
Because the limits are yours, so is the meaning. A fleet that is quiet over the weekend will show a high silent share on Sunday if your limits are short, and that is not a fault. Over time you will learn what a normal Monday looks like for each school and can read a departure from it as a signal. Pattern detection does this comparison for you across seven days against the previous twenty-eight. See pattern detection.
A sudden jump in silence across a group usually has a shared cause: a Wi-Fi change, a power cut, a network outage. A slow rise in a few devices is more often charging habits or devices being left in bags.
Rules keep working on a silent device, since they are cached on it. The cost of silence is that you cannot see it or change it until it reconnects.
Practical tip: use sync at the group level, wait a little, and see how the silent share falls. What remains is the real list.