Your account is its own world
Servers, keys, scripts, checks and passwords all belong to one account. There is no shared view, and no setting that could accidentally expose one account to another.
How the pieces fit together.
There are only three parts: Vantage itself, a small program on each of your servers, and one connection between them that your server opens.
your server checking in something you asked for
Your servers call us, not the other way round.
Each server reaches out to Vantage over an encrypted connection it opens itself. You don't open a port in your firewall, you don't need a fixed address, and a machine sitting behind a home router works exactly like one in a data centre.
Once that connection is open it stays open, so anything you ask for from the browser run this script, open a session, install these updates happens straight away rather than on a timer.
CHECKING
Access, every 30 seconds
The server asks who should be able to reach it. If nothing has changed, nothing is touched.
ASKING
Anything you press
Run a script, open a session, install updates, create a key. Sent down the connection as you ask for it.
REPORTING
Health and uptime
Load and free space every 30 seconds, full hardware details every 15 minutes, uptime checks as they finish.
Careful about the file it owns.
The only thing Vantage changes on your server is the list of keys allowed to log in. It compares that list against what you have set and leaves it alone when they already match, so most of the time it writes nothing at all. When it does need to make a change, it prepares the new list first and swaps it in one go a server that loses power halfway through keeps the list it already had, rather than ending up with half of one.
SCOPE
One file, nothing else
It doesn't manage your packages, your configuration or your users. Anything else that happens is a script you wrote and asked it to run.
REMOVING
Taking access away
Untick a server and the key is gone from it within 30 seconds. We keep the record that it was there, and who removed it.
Who can see what.
Owner, admin, member
Members get on with the day-to-day work. Admins and owners are the ones who add and remove people and change how the account is set up.
Email, or your own login
Email and password works out of the box. If your organisation already has a single sign-on provider, you can point Vantage at it instead.
Encrypted, and yours
Private keys, passwords and saved credentials are encrypted before they are stored. Host it yourself and the key that unlocks them is one only you have.
Things we left out on purpose.
NOT IN THE WAY
Your connections don't go through us
Vantage decides who is allowed in; when you log in you go straight to the server. If Vantage is down for any reason, you can still get to your machines.
NOT A KEYRING
We'd rather not hold your private keys
A key created on a server stays there unless you choose to upload it, and we only ever need the public half to give someone access.
NOT PER-PERSON
Access to the server, not to accounts on it
Vantage manages administrator access to each machine. Handing individual people their own separate logins on every box is a different job, and a bigger one.
NO ADD-ONS
Nothing to extend, on purpose
The program on your servers is small and has no plugin system. It runs with full privileges, so we would rather it be something you could sit down and read.