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A device is one machine running Beacon that forwards its sessions to your Beacon Cloud account. Each device has its own key, so you can revoke one without touching the others.

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Connect a device

On the machine, sign in and connect:
beacon login opens your browser to sign in. Signing in alone sends no telemetry. beacon endpoint connect registers the device with your account, stores its key locally and starts forwarding. If you run beacon endpoint install interactively and choose Beacon Cloud, it does both steps for you. Each time a device connects, Beacon also uploads the sessions it already found on disk from the last 30 days, so recent work appears right away. Pass --no-backfill to skip that.
To set up a device with a coding agent, paste this into it: Read https://beacon.sh/start.md then set me up on Beacon
For system-wide installs, privacy modes, offline buffering and every flag, see the beacon endpoint connect reference.

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Check a device

The Devices page at beacon.sh/dashboard/devices lists every device registered to your account, with its hostname, install ID, key prefix, when it was created and when Beacon last heard from it. A new device reads Waiting for first event until its first batch arrives. On the machine itself:
reports whether the forwarder is running and whether Beacon Cloud accepts the device key.

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Revoke a device

Select Revoke device on the device’s card. Beacon Cloud rejects that device’s uploads immediately. History it already sent stays in your account. A revoked key cannot be restored. To bring the machine back, run beacon endpoint connect again to enroll it with a new key. To stop forwarding from the machine itself, run:
This stops the forwarder and deletes the local key. It does not revoke the key in Beacon Cloud, so revoke it on the Devices page too if the machine is lost or retired.

Sessions

Read what your connected devices recorded.

Beacon Cloud forwarding

What leaves a device and how it is sent.