Manage a fleet of machines

You can use Viam’s cloud-based fleet management tools to monitor and manage access to your fleet of smart machines. Use these tools as you create and scale a new fleet of smart machines, or integrate Viam to manage and add functionality like data management to your existing fleet.

For example, you might have 30 robots in one warehouse and 500 in another. You can monitor and teleoperate all of the robots from one online dashboard, and grant permission to other users to do the same. You can grant users different levels of access to individual machines or to groups of machines.

Prerequisites

A Viam account
Go to the Viam app and sign up with Google, GitHub, Apple, or an email address.

Organize your machines

Before you start connecting your devices to the Viam app, you need to decide how you want to group your devices.

In the Viam app, machines are grouped into locations, and locations are grouped into organizations:

  • Each location can represent either a physical location or some other conceptual grouping.
  • An organization is the highest level grouping, and often contains all the locations (and machines) of an entire company.

These groupings allow you to manage permissions; you can grant a user access to an individual machine, to all the machines in a location, or to everything in an entire organization. You choose how to group your machines. You cannot move machines to other locations once created.

Two locations within an organization

If you’d like to look at an example, see Monitor Air Quality with a Fleet of Sensors.

1. Create organizations

  1. Log into Viam app in a web browser.
  2. Click the dropdown in the upper-right corner of the FLEET page and use the + button to create a new organization. Name the organization and click Create.
  3. Create additional organizations as needed.

2. Create locations

  1. Click FLEET in the upper-left corner of the page and click LOCATIONS. A new location called First Location is automatically generated for you.

    Use the … menu to edit the location name to what it represents for your use case. Then click Save.

  2. Create additional locations as needed using the Add location button, on the left of the LOCATIONS page.

3. Create sub-locations

If needed, you can add further sub-locations to, for example, differentiate groups of machines within an office.

To add a sub-location:

  1. Add a new location using the same Add location button.

  2. At the bottom of the location’s page, use the New parent location dropdown to choose a parent location. Click Change.

    The New York Office fleet page. The left Locations navigation panel lists Antonia's Home and RobotsRUs, with New York Office and Oregon Office nested inside RobotsRUs.

You can nest locations up to three levels deep.

Manage Access with Role-Based Access Control

To collaborate with others on your machines, you need to invite them to your organizations, locations, or machines. You can do this on the organization settings page, which you can navigate to by clicking on the organization dropdown in the top navigation bar and clicking on Settings:

1. Invite users and assign permissions

If you have the Owner role, in the Members section of the organization settings page you can click on Grant access to invite new users to an organization or a location to share access to the machines within it. Assign each user a role (owner or operator) to manage permissions.

Limit user access

Users with owner access to a location or organization, can collaborate on the machines within it.

2. Use API keys

You (and anyone with owner access) can create API keys for programmatic access to machines, locations, or organizations. You can manage this in the API Keys section of the organization settings page.

Organization page

Monitoring and debugging

Viam allows you to view all machines from a dashboard and access each machine, check its logs, check recent changes, and roll back changes if needed.

1. Monitor your fleet’s parts statuses and synced data

You can monitor your machines from your FLEET’s ALL MACHINES DASHBOARD subtab.

Fleet dashboard showing the machine parts, location, status, architecture and more

You can also monitor the amount of binary and tabular data your fleet has synced in the last 48 hours from the FLEET’s DASHBOARD subtab.

Fleet dashboard showing the machine parts and data sync overview

2. Monitor your fleet’s logs

Using the Viam app, you can monitor the status of each machine from its LOGS tab.

You can also access machine logs using viam machines logs on the command line, the Machines API, or the Viam mobile app.

3. Test your machines remotely

Using the Viam app, you can remotely operate machines from the TEST pane on the CONFIGURE tab or from the CONTROL tab.

You can also operate machine using the viam machines part run CLI command or Viam’s APIs, or the Viam mobile app.

4. Use configuration version history

The Viam app keeps a record of your configuration changes, allowing you to revert to earlier configurations if needed. To see the history of the configuration of a machine part, click on History on the CONFIGURE tab.

Configuration history for a machine part

Next steps

If you haven’t configured your machines yet, start there and explore provisioning.

Configure many machines
Configure many machines

Viam has a built-in tool called fragments for using the same configuration on multiple machines.

Install Viam
Setup for provisioning

Install and configure viam-agent for provisioning one or many machines.

With your machines set up on Viam, you can now manage data across all your machines, as well as use machine learning, SLAM, and other platform capabilities:

Collect sensor data
Collect sensor data

Gather sensor data, sync it to the cloud, and view it in the Viam app.

Train and deploy computer vision models
Train and deploy computer vision models

Use your image data to train a model, so your machines can make inferences about their environments.

Teleoperate and navigate with rovers
Teleoperate and navigate with rovers

Use Viam to teleoperate and navigate rover bases.