Minions

Live minion status and grains.

The Minions page shows every minion your Salt master knows about, their current online/offline status, primary IP address, and key OS grains. Data is served from the minion snapshot table — a local database kept current by Halite’s background pollers — so the page loads instantly even on large fleets.

For a detailed explanation of how polling and the snapshot table work, see How Halite Works.

Minion statuses

Each minion row carries one of five statuses, derived from both its key-approval state and its online presence:

Status	Meaning
online	Key is accepted and the minion responded to the most recent presence check
offline	Key is accepted but the minion did not respond
pending	Key is in the minions_pre bucket — awaiting approval
rejected	Key is in the minions_rejected bucket
denied	Key is in the minions_denied bucket

Only accepted minions can receive jobs. pending, rejected, and denied minions appear in the list so you can act on their keys from the Keys page without switching views.

Snapshot freshness

The snapshot row for each minion is updated by three separate pollers: keys, presence, and grains. If the oldest of those three timestamps is more than 10 minutes old, the page shows a stale warning badge. You can adjust poller cadences in Settings → Pollers.

Viewing a minion

1. Open the Minions page

   Click Minions in the left sidebar. The page loads immediately from the local snapshot database.

2. Find the minion you want

   Use the search field to filter by minion ID, OS, or IP address. The list is sorted alphabetically by minion ID.

3. Click a minion row

   Clicking a row opens the minion detail panel, which shows:

   • Full status and primary IP
   • Denormalized OS grains: os, os_family, osrelease, kernel, kernelrelease
   • Virtualisation type (virtual grain)
   • CPU count and total memory
   • Salt version
   • The full raw grains dictionary (expandable)
   • Recent run history and compliance trend

Grains data

Halite caches grains for accepted online minions only. The pollers pull grains from the Salt master’s grain cache (not by re-targeting the minion), so grains data does not require the minion to be responsive at query time.

The following denormalized columns are stored directly on the snapshot row for fast list-view rendering: os, os_family, osrelease, kernel, kernelrelease, virtual (as virtual_type), num_cpus, mem_total_mb, saltversion. The full grains JSONB column holds the complete grain dictionary for detail views.

Example: finding all Debian minions

On the Minions page, type Debian in the search box. The table filters to rows where os_family or os contains “Debian”, letting you quickly assess how many Debian hosts are online before running a package upgrade.

Permissions

All minion routes require view:minion:*.

Route	Permission
GET /api/minions	view:minion:*
GET /api/minions/{minion_id}	view:minion:*
GET /api/minions/{minion_id}/runs	view:minion:*
GET /api/minions/{minion_id}/compliance	view:minion:*

The built-in viewer role includes view:minion:*, so all users can see the minion list by default.