Getting started

This page helps you start with Deployment Manager. It shows how to sign in, what each tab is for, and what happens on your first day. For the words used here, see Words you need to know.

Sign in

This section shows how to sign in. There is no password.

  1. Open deployment.friendly-tech.com.

  2. In Email Address, type your company email address. Only the company’s own email domain can sign in.

  3. Click Send Sign-in Code.

  4. Open your mail. You get a 6-digit code and a link.

  5. Type the 6 digits and click Sign In. Or open the link from the mail, then click Sign In.

If the mail does not come, click Resend code. To use another address, click Change email.

The first time you sign in, you get the role viewer. A viewer can read, but cannot change anything. See People and roles.

The tabs

This section lists the tabs at the top of the screen. Some tabs appear only for some roles.

Tab What you do there

Installations

See every installation, one card each. This is the main working screen. See Create an installation.

Topologies

Create and edit the topologies that installations use. A topology says which services to install, and which server each one runs on. See Choose a topology.

People

See accounts, access requests, and security events. See roles and access.

Operations

Read the journal. It shows what was done, on which installation, by whom, and the result. See Operations journal.

AI Assistant

See what people asked the assistant, and which questions it could not answer. See the assistant. To ask it a question yourself, see Ask the AI assistant.

Training

Take the onboarding course. Each module unlocks a named set of actions. Until you finish that module, those actions are muted. The module’s own sentence appears next to each muted action. See Training.

Settings

Credentials for GitHub, Harbor, Jira and SMTP. The admin list. See Settings.

A new operator’s first day

This section lists, in order, what a new account can do on its first login. It also says what a person must grant.

  1. Sign in. Anyone inside the company’s own email domain can sign in without help. There is no password. You get a code and a link by mail.

  2. You are a viewer. A first login gets the lowest working rank, on purpose. Anyone in the company can sign in. But the working rank reaches every customer’s production servers. These two facts are never joined in an automatic grant. As a viewer, you can read every installation and topology, and you can take the training. You cannot change anything.

  3. The course opens by itself. It opens as a dialog, not as a tab. For a rank the training gate applies to, you cannot close it. The screens it teaches are refused until you complete its modules. So a "later" option would only lead to screens that refuse you.

  4. You see a shared demo installation. It is there from the start, for everyone. Every hostname in the demo is guaranteed never to point to anything real. So nothing you press on it can reach a customer. You cannot deploy it, and you cannot change it. You do not get an installation of your own yet. You build one yourself later, in the training module Build an installation. That module opens only after you get the working rank, user. See Training.

  5. Ask an administrator for the working rank. You never request a role through the tool. There is no queue for roles. Someone grants them on the Accounts screen. That person must rank above both the rank you hold and the rank being granted.

  6. Ask for access to the installations you will work on. That is a separate grant, with its own queue. See roles and installation access.

The course is not a formality. An action stays muted until you finish the module that teaches it. The module’s own sentence is shown beside the action. It names which module unlocks it. Reading is never limited. Only one module is open at a time, so the order is kept. The module you are currently in never mutes the control it is teaching. The modules follow the same order as the ranks. A viewer’s course is the three modules that cover everything a viewer can do. It ends there.

Training

This section describes the Training tab and how it limits actions.

The Training tab is the onboarding course. It is also a gate. Some actions on the Installations, Topologies and Test install screens stay muted until you finish the module that teaches them. The course’s own sentence is shown beside each muted action. There are three exceptions:

  • Reading is never limited. The list of installations and everything on it stays visible during the whole course.

  • The first step of a module never needs that module’s gate. The step that teaches "build an installation" can always open the screen it teaches. This is true even before that module is marked finished.

  • An outage never shows as "you are untrained". Sometimes the tool cannot tell if a module was finished, for example because a database is unreachable. Then the gate does not guess "no".

The course has fourteen modules, in a fixed order. The order is:

  • finding your way around,

  • reading an installation,

  • the in-app assistant (see Ask the AI assistant),

  • building a topology,

  • building an installation,

  • then every action that acts on an installation.

Nobody gets a practice installation when the account is made. You build it yourself, in the module Build an installation. It is the installation you save in that module. The modules after it use it: you download it and deploy it. The course gives you hostnames that never point to anything real. Keep them, and nothing you do in the course can reach a customer’s server. A viewer’s course is the first three modules, so a viewer never builds a practice installation and sees only the shared demo. A role with more actions gets a longer course.

A practice installation is a full installation. It can be given real hostnames and real credentials. So only its owner, and support_admin and above, can see it.

An account can be allowed past a module it has not finished. This exemption is recorded. Whoever administers training can see it and who has one. Whoever accepts a new trainee onto the team can see the whole team’s progress through the course on the same screen.