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.

    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.

Example

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