About Axeda Administration

Axeda Administration provides the Platform administration and security tools for the Axeda® Connected Product Management Applications and the assets registered with the Platform. The security tools enable you to prevent unauthorized access to the Platform and to sensitive data. The Administration application enables you to specify security for users and assets to allow only authorized users to access information stored in your Axeda® Platform. Access to the Administration application is limited to users with administrator privileges only. The Axeda® Connected Product Management Applications administrator has full control over which assets users can see, what tools they can use, what actions they can perform, and what data they can view.

When you first start your Platform, you use Axeda Administration to configure Delegated Admin Units (if required), user authentication, privileges, and security within the applications. Only users and user groups configured in your Platform can access the Axeda® Connected Product Management Applications.

For details about the features of Axeda Administration, click the following titles to display the details; click the title again to hide the details:

User authentication and privileges

You can create users and user groups in your directory service or from Axeda Administration. (Support for user management operations depends upon your Platform administration privileges.) From the Axeda Administration application, you can create roles for users. Roles provide another way to group users and define application privileges. You add privileges to user groups and roles: the users assigned to each group or role will inherit the privileges assigned to that group or role. Privileges define the Axeda® Connected Product Management Applications tools and functionality that users associated with the group or role can perform. For example, members of a customer service user group may need just view-only access to portions of the Axeda Service application, whereas members of a technical support group need full privileges (typically, View, Add, Edit, and Delete privileges to pages or features of an application).

Asset groups

You can organize assets into groups for management and security and then assign user groups to asset groups, thus enabling the users assigned to those user groups to access the assets in the assigned asset groups. The ability to specify user group and role access to asset groups ensures that only the proper, authorized personnel can access asset data and perform operations on assets.

Asset groups are hierarchical. At the top of the hierarchy is the default Root Asset Group, which can be renamed but not deleted. You can add asset groups to the Platform either manually through the pages of the Administration application or dynamically (through dynamic group definitions). Either way, you must select one (and only one) Parent Asset Group. The Platform uses the combination of the name of the selected Parent Asset Group (and any parents it has, all the way up to the Root Asset Group) to create a fully qualified name for the new asset group. For example, suppose the asset group SP1 has been created under the Root Asset Group. When a new asset group called Simulators is created, the group SP1 is the selected Parent Asset Group. The fully qualified name for this new asset group is:

Root Asset Group | SP1 | Simulators

By default, an asset group is created for every new model added to the Platform. All of these default asset groups for models are special entities in the Platform that cannot be deleted. The Parent Asset Group for these default groups is called Default Model Groups. It is an immediate child group of the Root Asset Group and also cannot be deleted.

Reporting and tracking Platform activity, including remote sessions

From the Administration application you can manage reports and monitor remote sessions. The Audit log provides feedback on all activity performed by application users or the Platform itself, as well as an information trail of contacts from Axeda® Gateway and Axeda® Connector agents or tracking assets. From this application, you can set asset defaults that enable the Platform to automatically "provision" new assets with a default set of parameters, such as a default asset condition.

Remote sessions servers

From this application, you can view the Axeda® Global Access Servers and TotalAccess™ Servers available for managing remote sessions with assets. The Global Access Servers manage remote sessions for the Axeda® Gateway, Axeda® Connector, and Axeda® Agent Embedded agents while Total Access Servers manage remote sessions with Axeda® IDM Agents.

Parent server support

The Administration application also contains settings to configure this Platform as a "child" server of another, "parent" Platform. Known as Axeda Care technology, this support enables the vendor to have filtered access to local Axeda Platform data.

Server configuration

Important configuration settings for the Axeda Platform are available for viewing online in the System Configuration page of the Administration application. You may need to reference these settings from time to time to determine server installation paths and various IP addresses, directory service settings, timeout settings, Cognos reporting settings, database settings, asset communication settings, SSL settings, parent-server settings, and so forth.

Licensing

You can view the current license settings for your server, and reload your license to apply any licensing changes.

Data Archiving

Through the Administration application, you can define how you want to archive data from fully online (available for use and viewing within the Applications tools) to near-line (maintained in the database but not exposed in the Applications). Archived data can be restored for use in the Applications. You can view archiving history.

About Axeda® Administration