How customers, sites, and devices work
How octoja organises customers, sites, and devices and keeps each customer's data separate
As an IT provider, you manage all of your customers in one octoja instance. octoja organises monitored environments in a simple hierarchy — customer, site, and device — and keeps each customer's data separate from the others.
Customer
A customer is the managed organisation. Every company you look after is a separate customer. If your organisation is the only managed environment, you can create a single customer for it to use customer-based filtering and access control.
Examples: "Acme GmbH", "Mueller & Partner", "City Council IT"
A device that runs an agent can be assigned to a customer, but does not have to be. A device without one shows a dash in the Customer column; you can pick these devices out with the No Customer entry in the device list's customer filter, or under Unassigned devices in the dashboard tree. A network device is the exception: you register it by hand, and a customer is required at that point.
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 — a customer with a single location can do without them. A device that belongs to a customer but to none of its sites appears under that customer's Without site row in the dashboard tree.
Device
A device is a monitored workstation, server, or other supported system. Most devices run the octoja agent and register themselves. A network device — a switch, router, firewall, printer, NAS or ESXi host, for example — runs no agent: you add it by hand and pick one of your agent-managed devices to probe it.
A device can be assigned to a customer and, optionally, to one of that customer's sites. A site assignment only exists inside its customer, so moving a device to a different customer does not carry the previous site over. You can assign a site belonging to the new customer instead.
Examples: "fileserver-01", "reception-pc", "router-hq"
Keeping customer data separate
Customers are what separate your clients from each other: devices and cases belong to a customer, and one customer's devices and cases stay out of another customer's view. You filter dashboards and reports by customer or site, and you generate a report for one customer or across all of them.
Users, on the other hand, are not tied to a customer. What a user can reach is decided by the groups they belong to:
- A group's Customer Access grants access to all customers, to specific customers, or to every customer matching a customer tag rule.
- Its Device Access narrows that reach within those customers and sets which actions members may perform on the devices they reach.
A device or case without a customer is reached only by groups whose Customer Access covers all customers — until you assign one.
Administration → Access Overview shows the result by user, by customer and by device, together with the group that granted the access and the reason for it. To set up groups and their access, see How Users, Groups & Permissions Work.
You set up white-labeling once for the whole octoja instance, not per customer.
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. This applies to devices with an agent; a network device you added by hand keeps the record you created for it.
- Known identity: the contact is attached to the existing device; the device record and its history stay in place. A device that was deleted in the meantime is restored instead of duplicated. On re-enrollment with a customer-bound enrollment token, the device adopts the token's customer and site, replacing any previous assignment. If the token has no site, the previous site is cleared. Without a customer-bound token, a valid existing assignment is preserved.
- 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.
Device identity and customer assignment are independent: the same device can belong to a different customer after a reinstall. Group-based access and customer-specific rules are re-evaluated accordingly. Check the token's customer and site before reinstalling. See Configure Agent Enrollment Tokens for the full assignment rules.
By default the device identity is generated once during installation and stored on the device itself — in the registry on Windows, in a configuration file on Linux and macOS. It survives agent reinstalls and updates, but is lost when the operating system is set up from scratch. On Windows, the agent can instead be configured to take its identity from a unique firmware identifier of the machine, which survives an operating-system reinstall as well. Where the firmware reports no usable identifier, the agent falls back to a generated identity.
In practice: as long as the agent uses the same identity, a reinstall or update does not create a duplicate. A duplicate only appears when the agent reports an identity octoja has not seen before, for example after a hardware replacement, or when the operating system is reinstalled and the locally stored identity goes with it.
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