Locations and estate¶
Interact DC has two modules, and your organisation may have one or both.
The Simulations module is the planning tool: describe what you run, compare it against hardware you are considering, get a report. Everything else in this guide is about that.
The Estate module is the record of what you have today — locations, server inventory, utilisation over time, and dashboards over the lot. It is a live picture rather than a projection.
Estate is off unless you asked for it
New organisations start with Simulations only. If nothing in this page matches what you see, your organisation does not have the Estate module enabled — ask your administrator.
Changing the estate is an administrator's job
Everyone in your organisation can read the estate — the inventory, the dashboards, the utilisation history. Adding, editing or removing servers, locations and server groups is limited to administrators, so the record of what you own stays in one pair of hands.
The two work well together: keep the inventory current in Estate, then pull it straight into a simulation instead of re-entering it. Each also works on its own.
Locations¶
A location is a physical site — "London DC1", "Frankfurt Colo", "New York DR". Every server in the Estate module belongs to one, and locations are the main way of organising servers by where they actually sit.
Each location has a dashboard showing how many servers are active, their average efficiency grade, CPU and memory utilisation, and how those have moved over time.
The reason locations matter outside the Estate module: from a simulation you can choose Import from Location and pull that location's whole inventory into your specification in one step. See Run your first simulation.
Server groups¶
A server group is an optional grouping that cuts across locations. Where a location is about physical geography, a group is about whatever you care to organise by — project, business unit, application cluster, refresh priority.
A server can belong to several groups at once, and each group gets the same dashboard treatment as a location.
Bulk upload¶
The upload wizard brings server records or utilisation measurements in from CSV. It works in the same shape as the simulation import: upload, say what kind of data it is and which location it belongs to, confirm the column mapping, then process.
The same 10 MB limit and the same encoding and delimiter detection apply. See Importing from CSV.
Hardware configurations¶
Both modules are built on the same catalogue. A hardware configuration is one server specification — vendor, model, CPU model, CPU count and memory — and carries the efficiency grade that everything else is calculated from.
Servers sharing a specification point at one catalogue entry rather than each storing their own copy, which is why correcting a match once fixes it everywhere. See Reading your results for what the grades mean.