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Projects and Roles

Upstat organizes work around projects and controls access through a two-layer permission system. Understanding this structure helps you set up your team effectively.

What is a Project?

A project is a logical container for related operational work. It groups together:

  • Monitors tracking your services
  • Incidents affecting those services
  • On-call schedules for responders
  • Escalation policies
  • Automations and runbooks
  • Catalog entities representing your infrastructure

Most teams create projects around service boundaries, environments, or team ownership. For example:

  • Production Infrastructure - All production services
  • Payments Team - Services owned by the payments team
  • Staging - Non-production monitoring

Each account starts with one project created during onboarding. You can create additional projects as your organization grows.

Two-Layer Permission System

Upstat uses two types of roles: account roles and project roles. This separation allows organization-wide permissions while still giving project teams control over their own access.

Account Roles

Account roles apply across your entire Upstat account. They control access to account-level settings and determine baseline permissions.

Role Capabilities
Owner Full control including billing, ownership transfer, and all settings
Administrator Manage users, projects, billing, and account settings
Editor Modify account settings but cannot manage users or billing
Billing View and manage subscription and billing only
Member Access assigned projects only, no account-level permissions

Every user has exactly one account role. The account creator is automatically assigned the Owner role.

Project Roles

Project roles control what a user can do within a specific project. The same user can have different roles in different projects.

Role Capabilities
Project Manager Full control over the project including settings and membership
Contributor Create and manage monitors, incidents, schedules, and automations
Analyst View all project data and work with reports (read-only for most resources)
Viewer Read-only access to project data

How Roles Interact

Account roles and project roles work together, with account roles providing a baseline:

  • Owners and Administrators have implicit access to all projects
  • Members can only access projects they’ve been explicitly added to
  • Within a project, the project role determines specific capabilities

For example, a user with the Member account role and Contributor project role can create monitors and manage incidents within that project, but cannot access account settings or other projects.

Project Membership

Users must be added to a project before they can access it (unless they have Owner or Administrator account roles).

When a new user is invited to your account:

  • They are automatically added to the default project as a Contributor
  • Project Managers or Administrators can add them to additional projects
  • Each project can have different role assignments for the same user

Ownership Transfer

Account ownership can be transferred to another user who has an Administrator role. Only the current Owner can initiate this transfer. This is useful when:

  • The original account creator leaves the organization
  • Responsibility for the account changes to another team member