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Projects & Roles

Understand how projects work in Upstat and how user roles control access.

In Upstat, your organization is structured around projects, and access is managed through a combination of account roles and project roles. This article explains what a project is, how roles work, and how to manage membership and permissions across your team.

What Is a Project?

A project in Upstat represents a logical unit of work or responsibility. It could be a service, product line, team domain, or environment—whatever best maps to how you operationally manage incidents and monitors.

Each project contains:

  • Monitors (e.g., API, website, heartbeat)
  • Incidents
  • On-call schedules
  • Automations
  • Catalog entities
  • Settings and permissions

When you sign up, an initial project is created automatically. You can rename it and adjust its settings anytime.

Each Upstat account can have multiple projects, and each user can be a member of one or more projects.

![Placeholder: Project Dashboard Screenshot]

Account Roles vs. Project Roles

Upstat uses two layers of permission control:

Account Roles

Account roles define a user’s authority across the entire Upstat account. These are assigned once and apply globally:

  • Owner – Full control, including billing, user management, and project settings
  • Administrator – Can manage users, billing, and projects
  • Editor – Can manage settings but cannot add or remove users
  • Billing – Can view and manage subscription and seat usage
  • Member – Can access projects they’re assigned to, but cannot manage account-level settings

If a user has an account-level role that grants more access than their project role, the account role takes precedence.

![Placeholder: Account Role Settings Screenshot]

Project Roles

Project roles determine what users can do within each specific project:

  • Project Manager – Full control over the project and its members
  • Contributor – Can create and manage incidents, monitors, and schedules
  • Analyst – Can view all project data and generate reports
  • Viewer – Read-only access to project data

Each project has its own member list. You can assign different roles for the same person across different projects.

You must have an account role of Owner or Administrator to assign project roles.

![Placeholder: Project Role Assignment Screenshot]

Managing Project Membership

To add users to a project:

  1. Open Project Settings
  2. Go to the Members tab
  3. Click Add Member
  4. Select a user from your team
  5. Assign a project role and save

Only users who are already part of the account can be added to projects. To invite a new user to the account, go to Account Settings → Team.

![Placeholder: Add Project Member Dialog Screenshot]

Changing or Transferring Ownership

The account Owner has exclusive privileges, including transferring ownership to another user.

To transfer ownership:

  1. Go to Account Settings → Team
  2. Click the menu next to the current Owner’s name
  3. Select Transfer Ownership

Ownership can only be transferred to another existing user with an Administrator role or higher.

![Placeholder: Transfer Ownership Screenshot]

Summary

  • Projects organize everything in Upstat—incidents, monitors, schedules, automations, and more.
  • Access is controlled by account roles (global) and project roles (per-project).
  • Account-level roles always override project roles.
  • Project members must first be account users.

This layered structure gives you fine-grained control while keeping team management simple and safe.

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