Customer, Site, and Device Model
How octoja organises customers, sites, and devices
Written By Erdinc Akay
Last updated 25 days ago
octoja organises monitored environments using a simple hierarchy: customer, site, and device.
Customer
A customer is the managed organisation. Monitored devices can be assigned to a customer — the assignment is optional, and a device without one is shown as No customer until you assign it.
Examples: "Acme GmbH", "Mueller & Partner", "City Council IT"
If your organisation is the only managed environment, you can create a single customer record for it to use customer-based filtering and access control.
Site
A site is a physical place within a customer, such as an office, warehouse, or data centre.
Examples: "Head Office", "Munich Branch", "AWS Frankfurt"
Sites are optional when a customer has only one location.
Device
A device is a monitored workstation, server, or other supported system. A device can be assigned to a customer and, optionally, to one of that customer's sites.
Examples: "fileserver-01", "reception-pc", "router-hq"
Device identity: recognition after reinstalling
octoja does not recognise a device by its name or serial number. During installation the agent registers with a unique device identity, and every later contact — including a freshly reinstalled agent — is matched against exactly that identity.
- Known identity: the contact is attached to the existing device. The device record, its history, checks, and assignments stay in place — even a device that was deleted in the meantime is restored instead of duplicated.
- Unknown identity: octoja creates a new device record. Customer and site come from the enrollment token used for the installation; without a token the device starts out unassigned.
The device identity is either derived from the hardware — a unique firmware identifier of the machine that survives an operating-system reinstall — or generated once and stored locally on the device, where it survives agent reinstalls and updates but is lost when the operating system is set up from scratch.
In practice: reinstalling or updating the agent on the same system is uncritical — the device keeps its identity, and no duplicate appears. A duplicate only appears when the agent reports an identity octoja has not seen before, for example after a hardware replacement or when a locally stored identity was removed together with the operating system.
Why this structure is used
This hierarchy helps you:
- Filter views by customer or site
- Apply checks to related devices
- Limit user access to the relevant customer environment (an administrator configures this in group settings)