New Features: Group Accounts and Server Tagging

We are excited to announce that we have launched a couple of new features this morning, both highly anticipated based on the recent feedback.

Firstly, Group Accounts allow customers to add additional users to their accounts in a secure manner with granular permissions. Group Accounts are made up of a single main account and subaccounts. The person with access to the main account can grant access to subaccounts.

Secondly, Server Tagging will allow you to group your servers with tags. For example, it is now possible to group development environment servers easily with the #dev -tag and production servers with the #prod -tag for example. With server tags, managing your servers is easier than before. Now you can list only certain servers with the help of server tags in the list view.

Server tags can also be used as a way to allow or limit access to additional users in your account. Therefore, a certain group can only have access to #dev resources whereas another group can work on #prod servers. Furthermore, customers can grant access to certain servers and disk resources on an individual basis, in addition to the tags.

As there can now be many users managing a server, we have improved the way server events are shown. From now on, individual users and their actions regarding the server in question are shown in the server history details. This includes server shutdowns, reboots, changes to resources and so forth. We hope this will help larger teams work in a more productive manner with servers on UpCloud, while still keeping everything simple and easy to use.

Another addition to the user accounts is the addition of profile pictures. Profile pictures are used in the server events for faster recognition of individual users’ actions. To start off with, profile pictures are loaded from Gravatar.com – a service being utilised by the likes of GitHub, WordPress and StackOverflow. Just make sure you have listed the e-mail address you have registered on UpCloud to Gravatar.com and we’ll find your profile picture. Gravatar.com is a free service and you can add your e-mail there in minutes if you haven’t already done so.

Accounts that have had a billing and a technical contact listed before the launch of these features will see two subaccounts listed under the User Accounts -menu item. For example, the main account “example” will have two subaccounts titled “example_tech” and “example_bill”. These usernames do not have access to any of the resources nor the Control Panel of the main account unless they are granted access. This can be done under User Accounts.

We know this is a lot of information to digest, but we have worked hard to keep the usability of the new features as easy as possible. We have also written a support document to help go through the new feature and functionalities in more detail. You can find it under our Support section.

We hope you enjoy these new features and it will help you work more productively with your servers on UpCloud!
Photo: Apple by Hernán Piñera