Getting Started
This guide covers signing in for the first time and finding your way around the portal. For what each operation does, see the Overview.
These guides are served by the portal, so the address you reached them at is the portal’s — go to the portal.
Getting an account
Accounts are provisioned by the DevOps team — there is no self-service sign-up. Contact them to have an account created, then set your password as described below.
First login (setting your password)
A new account has no usable password until you set one. On the login page:
- Click Forgot your password? / First Login? below the Sign In button.
- Enter your work email address and submit — the same one your account was created against.
- If an account exists for that address, a password-reset link is emailed to you. Check your spam folder if it doesn’t arrive within a few minutes.
- Open the link and choose a password.
- Return to the login page and sign in.
The confirmation message is shown whether or not an account exists for the address — this is deliberate, so the page can’t be used to discover which emails have accounts. If you don’t receive an email, confirm with DevOps that your account exists.
The same flow is used any time you forget your password later.
Signing in
Enter your work email address and password and click Sign In. After signing in you land on the homepage, which presents the available operations as cards.
Every operation card — and every page within an operation — carries an Experimental badge. The portal is under active development; read the on-page warnings before acting on a production server.
Sessions last about 4 hours of inactivity and then expire. If you’ve been idle and a page stops responding or bounces you to the login screen, just sign in again.
Navigation
The top navigation bar is available on every page after you sign in:
| Item | What it opens |
|---|---|
| Tools | Dropdown to start any operation: Data Migration, Data Refresh, Host from Backup — On-Server, Host from Backup — Object Storage, Live File Transfer, Live File Copy, Download File, File Corruption Check, File Compact, File Encryption. |
| History | Your past operations and any currently running jobs. See History. |
| Logins | (Staff only) The login-activity audit log. See History. |
| Admin | (Staff only) The Django admin site, for managing servers, users, and access. |
| Timezone (clock icon) | Dropdown to choose how timestamps are displayed everywhere in the portal: your local timezone (the default) or UTC. The label shows the timezone currently in use, and your choice is remembered by the browser. |
| Your email | Click to sign out. |
The Logins and Admin items appear only for staff accounts. Which servers and clients you see throughout the portal depends on the access you’ve been granted — if a server you expect is missing, ask DevOps to grant your user or group access to it.
What you can and can’t reach
- You only see clients and servers you have been granted access to. Two people may see different option cards and server lists.
- Mac servers (in the
macs_fmsgroup) currently appear only in Data Migration, Data Refresh, and Live File Transfer. They are hidden from Host from Backup — On-Server, Host from Backup — Object Storage, and File Corruption Check while support for those workflows is being built. - Operations that require a deploy chain (Migration, Refresh, and Live File Transfer) only list clients whose servers have one configured.
Getting help
If you hit an error you don’t understand, note the message shown on the job output or progress page and share it with the DevOps team. For AWX-driven operations (Migration, Refresh, Corruption Check) the job output page links directly to the job in AWX, which DevOps can use to investigate.