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Contacts and images

A contact is a person or a team you call about something: a NOC, an on-call rota, a facilities manager, a vendor account rep. A contact role says what the contact is for on one object: Owner, Technical, Billing, On-call and NOC come built in, and you can add your own. An assignment puts a contact in a role on an object, with an optional priority (primary, secondary, tertiary or inactive).

An asset's Owner line on the Overview is still just an email address kept for convenience; it is not a contact, and the two are not linked.

Manage contacts

Settings -> Infrastructure -> Contacts has two tabs.

  • Contacts: add, edit and delete contacts. A contact has a name, an optional title, email, phone, address and link, and an optional group - another contact it belongs to, so a team can hold its members. Names are unique within a group.
  • Roles: add, edit and delete your own roles. The built-in roles are marked Built in and cannot be changed. A role that is still assigned somewhere cannot be deleted.

Anyone with the DCIM read permission can see both tabs; changing anything needs dcim.manage.

Assign a contact

On an asset's Overview tab, the Contacts section lists who is assigned, primary first, with each contact's role, priority, email and phone. With dcim.manage:

  1. Choose Assign contact.
  2. Pick an existing contact, or New contact... and type a name (and optionally an email)
  3. the contact is created and assigned in one step.
  4. Pick the role, and optionally a priority, then Assign.

The same contact can hold several roles on one object (an owner who is also the billing contact), but not the same role twice. The remove button on a row removes that assignment only; the contact stays. Deleting a contact removes all of its assignments.

Every assignment, edit and removal is recorded in the object's change log.

Images

The Images section of the same tab holds pictures of the object: a photo of a rack before the cabling work, a floor plan, a label. Upload image accepts PNG, JPEG, WebP and SVG files of up to 5 MB; the type is decided from the file's contents, not its name, so a program renamed to .png is refused. An SVG that contains a script, an event handler or an embedded object is refused as well. Click a thumbnail to open the full image; the trash button deletes the image and its stored file.

Images are kept in the object storage an administrator has configured for the platform (artifact type dcim_images, enabled the same way as CBOM artifact storage). Until that is enabled they are kept on the disk of the inventory service (DCIM_IMAGE_DIR), which is lost if the pod is replaced without a volume mounted there.

API

Under /api/v2/inventory-service/dcim: contacts, contact-roles, contact-assignments (list, create, read, edit, delete), objects/{kind}/{id}/contacts (list and assign), objects/{kind}/{id}/images (list and multipart upload), images/{id} (metadata, delete) and images/{id}/download (the bytes). Reads need dcim.read, writes dcim.manage.