Customers

A Customer in ThingsBoard is a logical business entity (for example, a department, company branch, or external client) used to isolate data and provide controlled access to IoT resources within a Tenant.

Customers allow a Tenant to delegate access to devices, assets, dashboards, and other entities while maintaining clear ownership boundaries and enforcing permissions using the ThingsBoard RBAC model.

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From the sidebar, navigate to Customers & users ⇾ Customers. The Customers page lists all Customers under the selected group and provides tools to add and manage them. The page has three tabs:

• All — every Customer visible to the current user, flattened into a single list.
• Groups — Customers organized into entity groups.
• Hierarchy — a tree view of Customers and their sub-customers.

Enable Include customer entities to also list Customers owned by other Customers (sub-customers) alongside those owned directly by the Tenant; disable it to show only top-level Customers.

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Tenant Administrators can create, edit, and delete Customers, as well as manage their assigned resources.

Customer users (with the required permissions) can also create their own sub-customers and manage their assigned resources.

The Add customer dialog collects the new Customer’s information across two steps.

1. From the sidebar, navigate to Customers & users ⇾ Customers.
2. Click + Add customer in the top right corner.
3. On the Customer details step, enter a title. Optionally, specify the country, city, state/province, zip/postal code, address, phone number (in E.164 format, e.g. +12015550123), contact email, a description, and a custom menu. White labeling is allowed by default; disable it if the Customer should not be able to customize branding.
4. Click Next: Owner and groups to open the optional second step.
5. The Owner field defaults to the current user. To create the new Customer as a sub-customer instead, replace it with an existing Customer — the new Customer is then nested under that Customer in the Hierarchy tab.
6. Optionally, assign the Customer to one or more Groups. By default, it’s placed in the All group.
7. Click Add.

New customers appear in the customer list, where actions for managing their resources are available.

1. From the sidebar, navigate to Customers & users ⇾ Customers.
2. Click the customer to open its details.
3. Click the orange pencil icon (Toggle edit mode) to enter edit mode.
4. Update the customer information.
5. Click the checkmark icon (Apply changes), or the X icon to discard the changes.

Delete a Customer either from the customer list or from its details:

1. Click the trash icon next to the customer name in the list, or open the customer and click Delete customer on the Details tab.
2. Confirm the deletion.

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Customer users are individual user accounts granted access to the platform within the scope of a specific Customer. Unlike a Tenant, a Customer doesn’t own resources outright — it’s granted scoped access to a subset of the Tenant’s resources, so a Customer user can only interact with entities specifically assigned to their Customer account.

For details on creating and managing Customer users, see Users.

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Each row in the Customers table includes actions for managing that customer’s resources.

Icon	Description
Manage customer users	View, create, edit, activate, deactivate, and delete users associated with the Customer.
Manage customers	Create and manage child Customers within the hierarchy, including editing and removing sub-customers.
Manage customer assets	Add, manage, and delete customer assets.
Manage customer devices	Add, manage, and delete customer devices.
Manage customer entity views	Create and manage Entity Views to provide controlled access to specific device data.
Manage customer edges	Add and manage Edge instances associated with the Customer.
Manage customer dashboards	Add, view, manage, and delete Dashboards available to the Customer.
Manage owner and groups	Reassign the Customer’s owner (making it a sub-customer of another Customer) and manage its entity group membership.
Delete	Remove the Customer and its associated users from the system.

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Clicking a Customer in the Customers table opens the Customer details page. The following tabs provide access to all configuration, monitoring, and management tools for the selected Customer.

Tab name	Description
Details	Edit the Customer’s core information, reach the management shortcuts (users, customers, assets, devices, entity views, edges, dashboards, owner and groups), delete the Customer, and copy its Customer ID.
Attributes	Manage Customer attributes.
Latest telemetry	View and manage the most recent telemetry values associated with the Customer. Supports adding new telemetry entries and deleting existing data.
Alarm rules	Configure alarm rules at the Customer level to define conditions that trigger alarms based on telemetry or attribute data (subject to Tenant-level configuration).
Alarms	View and manage alarms related to the Customer, including acknowledgment and status updates.
Events	View system events associated with the Customer, including lifecycle events, warnings, and errors for troubleshooting and monitoring.
Relations	Manage entity relationships between the Customer and other entities such as devices, assets, dashboards, or rule chains. Allows creating and deleting relations.
Audit logs	View a history of actions performed on the Customer entity, including configuration changes and user activities.
Version control	Manage versioned exports and restore operations for Customer-related entities using the version control service.

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Capability	Description	Guide
Create customer users	Add user accounts for customer staff so they can log in and access only their own entities and dashboards	Users
Assign devices and assets	Link devices, assets, and dashboards to a customer to scope their visibility to that customer’s users only	Devices
Build customer dashboards	Create dashboards visible to customer users that display only their own entities’ data	Dashboards
Define access permissions	Control which entities and actions customer users can access using role-based access control	Roles
Organize with entity groups	Group a customer’s entities by type or purpose for bulk management and fine-grained permission assignment	Entity Groups
Create sub-customers	Build a multi-level customer hierarchy for reseller or delegated management scenarios	Customers
Enrich rule chain messages	Reference customer-level attributes in rule chains to route or enrich messages based on customer context	Rule Engine