Overview

Operating Ternary as an Managed Service Provider (MSP) on behalf of your customers is straightforward once it is set up.

First, some definitions apply:
MSP (Parent) Tenant

• This is the main entry point for your technical staff
• This provides a view across all of your customers
• Your staff will be able to drill into customers from this tenant

Customer (Child) Tenant

• This is set up in a 1-to-1 relationship with each of your clients. For example, if you have Adam’s Autos, Betty’s Bakery, Cathy’s Crafts as customers, each will be in their own Child Tenant
• Users added to these child tenants can only see their own accounts and subscriptions

Building those associations in Ternary will depend on how the billing accounts are set up.

Deployment mode 1: Integrated Billing

• Integrations to Cloud providers are set up and maintained in the MSP Parent Tenant
• Child tenants have cloud definitions that do not actually connect to the clouds, but instead reference specific projects, accounts, or subscriptions in the Parent Tenant
• Billing data is maintained in both Parent and Child Tenants
• Custom Labels defined in the Parent Tenant are made available to all Child Tenants

Deployment mode 2: Separate Billing

• Integrations with cloud providers are set up and maintained in the Customer Child Tenant
• Customer Child Tenants have cloud definitions that connect to the available cloud billing and resource APIs and all features work within the Child Tenant
• Summarized data is promoted from the child, not the full set of features
• One set of data is maintained in the Child Tenant, only summarized stats show in the Parent Tenant
• Custom Labels defined in the Child Tenant are not made available to the Parent Tenant

Utilization metrics

Regardless of whether an Integrated or Separate Billing design is employed, Utilization data must be retrieved from the end customer’s projects. Knowledge of resource utilization metrics for those resources is maintained in the end customer’s cloud logging services. This can be accomplished by provisioning the Ternary GCP service account (the same one) in the end customer’s cloud and in the managed service provider’s cloud.

Ternary user management

• Users added to the Parent Tenant are not automatically added to each child, but can navigate to any Child Tenant via the Ternary MSP Dashboard
• Users added to a Child Tenant are locked into that tenant. They can have Tenant Admin or lower permissions
• They can be added to multiple Child Tenants, but each addition is a separate ‘Create User’ step per Child Tenant
• Users added to the Parent Tenant do not receive an invitation to Join Ternary via email
• Users added to the Child Tenant will receive an invitation to join via email