# Customers

## Customer Overview

Whether using Avantra as a single-tenant installation or multi-tenant, the customer setup is an important part of your Avantra installation. Avantra has been developed since the start from a Service Provider’s perspective and is at the core of all functions.

A customer makes a lot of sense for a service provider where there are literally different customers configured in the system and it is a logical separation of monitored objects, for single enterprises this can still be a very useful concept especially if you are dealing with different business units or entities that require logical separation.

Customers “own” the Systems contained within them. In other words, Systems are grouped by Customers within Avantra, where by default no representative of Customer A has the permission to access any data of Customer B. Similarly, other Managed Objects are “owned” by Customers.

Customers may be arranged hierarchically in order to allow inheritance of Permissions. On top of this hierarchy, there is a so-called root customer which cannot be modified and cannot own Systems, but which can be used to assign Permissions to. In other words, users who have permissions on a top customer get the same permissions also on all contained sub-customers. For example, this can be very useful for international organizations, where systems are grouped into different geographical locations.

### Defining Customers

Perform the following steps to define a Customer.

1. Select Administration Customers from the menu and push the New button.

2. Fill in the Customer's Name and hit the Create button. The Customer is created and its data is shown in a new frame.

3. You may also fill in some of the other fields, like Description or the address data, etc. You may additionally select a value for the TimeZone field if you intend to use Service Level Reports and/or Service Level Agreements.

4. Push the Apply button on top of the Customer frame if you made further changes.

You may also define a Customer Application. They are used as a grouping mechanism for SAP Systems. However, there is a generic Customer Application created anyway once you define the first SAP System for this Customer.

1. Select the Applications tab in the Customer frame and push the New button.

2. Select the appropriate Application Type and hit the Create button.

| In order to open an existing Customer, choose Administration Customers from the menu, select the desired entry from the list and push the Open button (or double-click the selection).

#### Ordering Customers Hierarchically

In order to build a Customer hierarchy (and make use of Permission inheritance), simply drag the child-Customer onto the parent in the Customer list.

To remove a child-Customer from its parent, select the child and push the Detach button.