Onboarding: Account Setup

5 min

This onboarding article on setting up your account on Domotz will help you establish a process to optimize your work flow.

We cover the following topics in our Account Setup guide:

  • How Domotz Billing works
  • Branding
  • Team Management
  • SSO
  • Shared Alerts and Ticketing Systems
  • Documentation systems
  • Monitoring Dashboards

Furthermore, please note that this article assumes that you’ve done your Domotz trail and now want to start using the software as part of your stack.

To start off our Account setup guide we cover how Domotz billing works. In Domotz each account is billed monthly, and you pay in advance for the next month. If in the previous month you install additional agents after your billing day, you will pay for this activation/usage in the next cycle.

We’ll now explain how this works using an example.

In Domotz, you should always consider your “billing day”. Billing day is the day you put your credit card in the system (or the day your free trial ended). So, let’s pretend that your billing day is the 20th of each month.

This means that on July 20th, if you have 4 active sites (agents) you will be billed 4 agents for the period July 20th – August 20th.

So, if after July 20th, you perform the following activities:

  • July 24th you activate another agent (named – ACME 1)
  • August 15th you activate another agent (named – ACME 2)

You’ll be billed for this usage in the next cycle. This means that on August 20th, you will have 6 active sites (agents), and you will be billed in advance for 6 agents for the period (August 20 – Sept 20).

But since the you have activated ACME 1 and ACME 2 during the previous period, you will also pay for the service for the running month (July 20 to August 20), so you will be billed for 6 agents + 2 activations.

You can access your Account (Company info) and Billing information here:

Showing how you can access the Account and Billing Info section in the Domotz portal from the Domotz Web app Settings section

Or directly from the Portal (https://portal.domotz.com), under the Account -> Info tab:

Showing the Account and Billing Info section in the Domotz portal Account setup on Domotz managing your account and billing details highlighting the Billing Day section

Please note that you need to be a Team Leader in order to access this view.

Next in the account set-up guide we cover branding. When it comes to branding the following tab allows you to configure your contact info and upload a company logo for display in the reports we generate:

Showing how you can access the Branding section in the Domotz portal from the Domotz Web app Settings section

Or you can configure these directly from the Portal (https://portal.domotz.com), under the Account -> Branding tab:

Showing the Branding section in the Domotz portal highlighting the Customize Reports section, the Upload Logo section, and the button "Save Changes"

Don’t forget to save your changes.

You can create/manage accounts for your team and your clients here:

Showing how you can access the Team Management section in the Domotz portal from the Domotz Web app Settings section

Find more information about user roles in Domotz here: https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/team-management/

Please note that Team Members and Field Operator roles, have to be assigned to trusted colleagues or trusted customers.

For non-trusted users please use the Collaborator role. For more information about this please see the following article: https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/access-management/

Domotz supports SAML/SSO authentication with the following systems:

  • Microsoft Azure Active Directory
  • Evo
  • Okta
  • Jumpcloud

For more information on how to configure SAML/SSO please see:
https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/saml-sso-authentication/

If you are an MSP, and one of your client has more than one site/network which you’ll monitor, you can group your agents by using the Organization tab in the Inventory Dashboard:

Showing how you can find how to add an Organization on the Domotz App

Once the + button will be clicked you will be able to create a new Organization:

Showing how you can add a name to your organization

And then you can associate the chosen sites/networks (Domotz Agents) to that Organization:

Showing how you can associate a site to an organization

Once you associate these, you will be able to filter for the sites which belong to a specific organization by accessing the Inventory Dashboard Sites tab and apply a filter in the Organization column:

Showing how you can filter for sites which belong to a specific organization

You can also select directly the Sites/Networks (Domotz Agents) belonging to an Organization, by clicking directly on the Review button (mouse over the Total Sites column):

Showing how you can review the sites belonging to a specific organization

A right tab will appear with the list of Sites belonging to that Organization, the status and a quick link to the details for that specific Site/Network.

In Domotz there are two types of alerting systems:

1) Shared Alerts (will notify the entire team, or route the alerts to a ticketing or external system in general)

2) Personal alerts (will notify only the user within a specific Team/Account)

In others words the second type (Personal Alerts), will only trigger notifications to be sent to you. Shared alerts instead will notify your entire team. So, if you are an MSP and have team members, you would probably choose the first type of alerting system.

Additionally, if you are using a ticketing system you might want the system to receive alerts about network and device events. You should choose shared alerts, if you want to send notifications to a ticketing system.

To send alerts to your ticketing system, you’ll need to connect it with your Domotz account.

By accessing the “Alerting” section in the Domotz App, you can see all the Ticketing Systems we support. Choose click on ‘Connect Account’ to set-up your ticketing system with Domotz.

Showing how you can access the Contact Channels section in the Domotz App

Clicking this will give you access to the configuration guide for connecting your ticketing system:

Showing how you can connect your ticketing system to Domotz

Please note that you can connect/create as many contact channel you want.

Domotz integrates with many different types of ticketing software.

The list of the ticketing systems we support along with the corresponding ‘Connect’ button can be seen on the right side of the previous screen.

Now, you can create a Shared Alert Profile that will deliver your chosen alert events to the Contact Channel(s) that you just chose.

Showing how you can access the Alerts Settings section and where to click to create a Shared Alert Profile

After defining the Name and the Contact channel, you can select the events to monitor:

Showing how you can create a Shared Alert Profile, give it a name, associating a Contact Channel, decide which events you would like to monitor

Please read this guide in order to understand when and how to use each event https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/shared-alerts-events-list-explained/

It is very useful to enrich your Documentation Systems with the data coming from Domotz such as location, zone, status of the device, device name, MAC address, IP address, etc.

To be able to synchronize the documentation system of your choice, please see the following links:

IT Glue: https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/itglue-integration/

IT Portal: https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/it-portal/

Hudu: https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/hudu-integration/

Syncro: https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/syncromspdoc-integration/

Cloudradial: https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/cloudradial/

In general, you can leverage the Domotz Public API to extract the information out of Domotz to populate the Documentation system of your choice:

Domotz Public API

The Monitoring Dashboard is a flexible, multi-tenant view of all your devices as well as any sensors associated with your devices. Customizing your dashboards allows you to view the systems and sensors that you think are most important. Additionally, you can configure your dashboards in a way that makes sense in terms of how you work.

You can create multiple views by adding dashboards to the left column:

Showing how you can add a Monitoring Dashboard to Domotz

Additionally, you can add multiple tables to your dashboard by using the “Add Monitoring Table” button in the upper right. You will then have the option of adding a table specific to devices or a table of sensors.

Showing how you can add a Monitoring Table to Domotz

Within each Dashboard you can add multiple tables that can be sized based on what devices and data you’d like to have shown. The monitoring table sizes are quite flexible. On the other hand, consider that if the data goes beyond the table size, you can scroll to see the rows and columns as appropriate.

Showing how you can resize a Monitoring Dashboard

A good practice is to consider what data you would like to view in the table and how this data will be sorted. You can prioritize the sorting of columns to organize your information in a way that helps your teams efficiency.

Please read this guide on how to properly set-up the Monitoring Dashboards: https://help.domotz.com/user-guide/monitoring-dashboards/

When deploying Domotz on a network there are two main questions to ask:

  • How many Agents should I deploy in a network?
  • Where in the network should I plug in a Domotz agent?

The answers depends on how your network is set-up.

In this blog article on setting up networks with subnets and VLANs, we explain the most common network set-ups and how to approach them with Domotz.

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