Administrate Customers

With a Partner Account you can easily manage multiple customer accounts with the meshcloud Portal. The meshcloud administration area is the place to create and manage your customer accounts. You can access the meshcloud Administration Area by opening the settings menu and navigating to the Administration Area.

When selecting Customers in the menu bar on the left you can see the list of all customers managed by you.

Create managed Customer Accounts

Manually register a new Customer

With meshcloud you can easily create customer accounts.

Login to the meshPanel with your partner credentials.
If not logged in, please login with your Partner account credentials.
On the Welcome Dashboard, please make sure that you have selected your Partner account in the account selection on the top left.
Select Administration from the toolbox and go to Customers in the menu bar on the left.
There is a button + Create Customer on the top-right of the toolbar. After clicking the button, a dialog box will open and prompt for entering the name and identifier of the new customers as well as the user who owns the customer. An additional owner may be added in the Account area - Access Control page.

Attention: The identifiers can not be changed. Please choose them carefully.

After creation, a customer account contains no users yet. Therefore you need to access the created customer account and add other users to the newly created account.

Share a Customer Registration Link

If you want to have newly registered customers directly assigned to your administration account you can create an invitation link. If a new user registers with this link his customer account will be directly added to your administrator account and you will save some manual invitation steps afterwards. This feature must be enabled by the operator. To use it perform the following steps:

Login to the meshPanel with your credentials.
Navigate to the Administration area via the toolbox on the top right, then click on Customers in the menu.
In the Actions column click on the Invitation Link button (it is only visible if it is enabled by the operator).
Copy the link and give it to the people who should register a new customer.

Approve new Customer Accounts

A meshStack installation can be configured to require a manual approval by a partner/admin for new meshCustomer registrations. Users who register receive an email notifying them, that their account is currently being verified. As soon as a partner/admin approves the request, they receive another email. This email informs users, that they are now approved and can start working with the cloud resources. Dependend on the configuration, users may also have to confirm their email address via a confirmation link, that is available in the second email.

Manage Customer Accounts

Update Account Status

Partner users can update the status of meshCustomer accounts by clicking the Edit in the status column.

Disabling Customer Accounts

Operators can disable meshCustomers in case the responsible customer admins do not provide valid Payment Methods or do not maintain correct metadata.

Setting the meshCustomer account status to Disabled has the following effects on meshProjects and meshTenants owned by this customer:

users can no longer access meshTenants via meshPanel
users can no longer create Service Users

Disabling a customer does not technically prevent users from accessing tenants when logging in directly on the cloud platform. To prevent this access so, partners must add themselves to the customer account as an admin and manually remove user permissions and service users.

If you want to prevent a customer from creating new meshProjects, you can adjust the customer's meshProject quota.

Access managed Customer Accounts

As a partner user you can assign yourself a role on managed customer accounts. The role that will be assigned can either be "Customer Employee" or "Customer Admin" depending on the configuration of meshstack (read more here). If you are assigned as a Customer Employee you cannot execute step four and five.

Go to Administration > Customers and click on the Users icon on the managed customer account you want to edit.
In the Customers Users view click on the button Add Myself in the top right corner.
After you have successfully assigned yourself to the account you can now choose the account in the top left drop-down. Please select the new managed customer there.
In the toolbox go to Account > Users where you can invite and add users to the managed customer account.
Invited users will receive an e-mail with a link to get access to this new customer. For more details on user invitation, also see meshCustomer.

Send messages to customer users

Partner are able to send short notification messages to the users of their managed customer accounts. Recipients will see these notifications upon login.

In order to send such a message:

Login to the meshPanel with your partner credentials.
Navigate to the Administration area via the toolbox on the top right and then click on Customers in the menu.
In the Actions column click on the envelope icon.

Write your messages and choose which recipient should receive the messages: All must read will show the message to all recipients and everyone has to acknowledged the message. Or you can choose Single read only which will hide the message for all other users if one single user has acknowledged it. This is useful e.g. for maintenance task required to be done by the project team. Once one team member has solved the task, displaying the notification is no longer necessary.

Set Customer Quotas

Partners and Administrators can manage the quota, that limits the maximum number of projects per customer.

Login to the meshPanel with your credentials.
Navigate to the Administration area via the toolbox on the top right and then click on Customers in the menu.
In the Actions column click on the Quota icon on the managed customer account you want to edit.
Then you can increase and decrease the number of projects per customer.

Edit Customer Tag Values

Partner users can edit tag values for tags defined in both restricted and unrestricted tag schemas for managed meshCustomers by navigating to the Customers list and clicking the Customer Tags button

Audit Customer Accounts

Account History

Sometimes additional information about the lifecycle of a customer is required. The archive icon in the list of customers shows all major events that happened on the customer.

The following events are available:

CUSTOMER_REGISTERED: A new meshCustomer registered in self-service.
CUSTOMER_CREATED: A new meshCustomer was created by a partner/admin.
USER_INVITED: A user was invited to a meshCustomer.
USER_ACCEPTED_INVITATION: A user accepted the invitation.
USER_INVITATION_CANCELLED: An invitation was cancelled by a customer admin.
USER_REMOVED: A user was removed from the meshCustomer.
USER_ROLE_CHANGED: The role of a user was changed on the meshCustomer.
CUSTOMER_QUOTA_EDITED: The quota of a meshCustomer was changed.
USER_ASSIGNED_HIMSELF: A partner/admin assigned himself to a meshCustomer.
CUSTOMER_STATUS_CHANGED: A partner/admin changed the status of a meshCustomer (i.e. disabled or enabled the meshCustomer).
CUSTOMER_APPROVED: A partner/admin approved a new meshCustomer registration. This event is only available, when the manual customer approval is activated.