Projects and access – BDI Cloud

BDI Cloud is organized in layers, and your access is granted at a particular layer. That is why two people looking at the same project can see different things, and why the answer to "why can't I do this?" is usually about where your role was assigned rather than what your role is called.

This article covers the shape of the model. For the full rights breakdown, see Roles and permissions under Settings.

The layers

Layer	What it is
Organization	Your company. Holds your users and every team and project beneath it.
Team	A grouping of users inside the organization, with the projects that team works on.
Project	One monitoring engagement: a bridge, a dam, an excavation, a mine site.
Dashboard	An individual dashboard inside a project.
Alert	An individual alert inside a project.

Projects hold the monitoring data. Everything you actually work with — connections, devices, dashboards, Virtual Devices, alerts — belongs to exactly one project and does not cross into another.

Roles are assigned per layer

Each of those five layers has its own roles: owner, admin, editor, and viewer. A role is always attached to a specific layer, so being an editor is only meaningful once you know an editor of what.

Note: The rule that surprises people most is that editor and viewer access does not flow downward. Editing rights on a project do not automatically make you an editor of the dashboards and alerts inside it — those are separate grants. If you can open a dashboard but not change it, this is usually why.

Owner access behaves differently from editor and viewer, and the exact rights attached to each role vary by layer. Roles and permissions covers both in full.

Who manages access

Your organization has designated Team owners who can manage users and access within their scope. If you need access to a project, a dashboard, or an alert, they are who to ask.

Editing rights on a project do not include the ability to manage its users. Those are deliberately separate, so a project editor cannot grant access to themselves or to anyone else.

If your access looks wrong

Work through it in this order, because each step rules out a much more common cause than the one after it:

Confirm you are signed in with the expected account.
Confirm you have the intended project open.
Confirm you are a member of the project, not only of the team or organization above it.
Confirm your role is assigned at the layer you are trying to act on. Project access and dashboard access are separate grants.

If all four look right and access is still wrong, contact BDI Cloud Support with the account, the project, the specific thing you were trying to do, and what happened instead. Troubleshooting user access under Settings covers this in more detail.