Fleet Management

Hardware test labs rarely outgrow their first box — they outgrow their first ten. Once a fleet spans multiple benches, sites, or subsidiaries, engineers lose the ability to answer basic questions: which boxes are online, which instruments are wired to which net, who is using what, and which version of the Lager runtime each box is running. Stout closes that visibility gap with a single dashboard that continuously probes every registered Lager box and surfaces status, capabilities, and connected hardware in real time.

The value is not the status page. It is that the state of the fleet becomes a fact the organization shares, rather than something each engineer rediscovers by SSHing into a bench. A box that goes quiet is marked offline and alerted on instead of being silently skipped by the next test run; a box that comes back re-registers its own inventory instead of waiting for someone to update a spreadsheet. Onboarding an acquired lab, a second site, or a contract manufacturer's benches becomes a bulk operation measured in minutes, and the record stays accurate afterwards without anyone maintaining it by hand.

Contention is the tax that grows fastest with fleet size. Locking exists so that two engineers cannot drive the same instrument at once, and because it is enforced at the API rather than by convention, it holds for the dashboard, the CLI, and any tooling you write against Stout — there is no path around it. Maintenance windows extend the same idea to planned work: a bench can be taken out of dispatch for a hardware swap, a firmware update, or a calibration run without blocking the rest of the fleet, and without a message asking everyone to please stay off box seven.

Every state change is audited. Box registration, API-key rotation, lock acquisition, device disconnection, and manual overrides are all recorded with actor, timestamp, and correlation ID. For teams operating under SOC 2, ISO 27001, or internal compliance review, this turns "which engineer ran what on which piece of hardware last Tuesday" from an SSH-log archeology expedition into a filtered query.