Organize your machines

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

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 like “Production” and “Testing”.
  • 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

Create organizations and locations

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.

You can nest locations up to three levels deep.

Example

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

Frequently asked questions

Can I move a machine to a different location?

No, it is not possible to move a machine to a different location.

It is also not possible to change the location of a robot with an SDK.

If you want to have the machine in a different location, you will need to create a new machine and copy the old machine’s configuration to the new machine.

Can I move a location to a different organization?

No, it is not possible to move a location to a different organization.

You can share a location with another organization. However, machines will continue to use the primary organization as a reference point. This means any captured data is associated with the primary organization and the machines are only able to use private ML models and registry items from the primary owner.