Answered directly, including the ones where the answer is no.
Does it need root?
No, on most vendors. NVIDIA through NVML, Apple silicon, and everything read from /sys work as an ordinary user. A few vendor tools insist on privileges of their own; where one does, siltide says so in the Sources view rather than failing quietly.
Does it phone home?
No. There is no telemetry, no update check and no analytics of any kind. siltide makes an outbound connection only for things you configured: a remote node, an SSH host, a webhook or an Alertmanager. With none of those in the config it opens no socket at all unless you pass --listen.
Does it work over SSH?
That is most of the point. It is one static binary with no daemon, so copying it to a jump host and running it there is the normal way to use it. --record on the host and --replay at home hands off an incident without anyone else logging in.
What happens on a machine with no accelerator?
It says so and exits with status 3 for --once, so a script can tell the difference between nothing found and something broken. --diagnose lists every vendor it probed, how long each took, and what to install for the ones that answered nothing.
Does it support MIG, and partitions generally?
Yes. A partition appears as its own device with the physical device recorded as its parent, so memory is not counted twice and a slice can be filtered like anything else. Kubernetes resources such as nvidia.com/mig-3g.40gb are read on the scheduler side too.
Why is a number N/A instead of 0?
Because the vendor reported nothing for it, and zero is a measurement. A card that reports no power draw and a card drawing no power are different situations, and siltide will not turn one into the other.
How much does it cost to run?
On the machine the published numbers came from: 19 MB resident for the interface, 25 MB for the headless collector, and about half a millisecond of work per collection pass over 64 devices. The measurements and the scripts behind them are on the front page and in the repository.
Can an agent use it?
Yes. --mcp-stdio and --mcp-http serve the same snapshot over the Model Context Protocol: the fleet summary, the devices, the processes, the history, the events and the health report, with the same filter language the interface takes. Every tool is a read.
Is it affiliated with any of the vendors?
No. siltide is an independent project under Apache-2.0. The vendor names it reports on belong to their own companies, and none of them has any say in what it shows.
Something missing? Open an issue: an unanswered question here is usually a missing paragraph in the documentation.