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Portal modules and permissions

The menu on the left shows only the modules your role grants View for; changes need Manage. The built-in Operator role covers labs, participants, groups and schedules. Templates and monitoring need a role with those permissions — an organisation administrator assigns it (see Roles and permissions).

Home shows active labs, the participant count, alerts, the labs Running now and shortcuts to the modules.

How a lab works

1. A template describes the virtual machines and the instructions. A lab is always made from a template.
2. Generate lab: you choose the template, the name and the participants. Each participant gets their own lab environment — their own copies of the machines.
3. A lab with status Ordered is having its environments created. When a participant's environment is ready they automatically receive an email with a link to their access page, and the participants table shows Ready.
4. On the end date a participant's environment is deleted together with its data. The lab stays in the portal as a record (status Completed in the list).

Generating a lab

Labs → New lab (or, on a group's page, Generate a lab for this group).

1. The Lab card: enter a Name and choose a Template (archived templates are not offered). Optionally choose a Synced group (see Groups) and the settings for its members.
2. The Additional participants card — add people in one of these ways:
   • One by one: email, first name, last name, organisation; Trainer marks a trainer.
   • From a file: CSV or XLSX (see Importing from a file).
   • From group: a one-off copy of a group's members (not synced).
   • From USOS: when your organisation has USOS connected — choose a teacher and their class groups.
3. Set the access settings (for everyone or per person):
   • Start date and End date, Time zone,
   • Login schedule — the hours in which a student may connect,
   • Disable date — the student loses access but the environment stays, so a trainer can review the work,
   • Time limit — total working time; once used up the student is signed out and cannot reconnect,
   • Language — of the invitation, the access page and the desktop.
   Schedules and limits never apply to trainers.
4. Check the Participants list — nothing is created until you press Generate.

Importing participants from a file

CSV (semicolon-separated, UTF-8) or XLSX files, up to 5 MB and 2000 rows. The easiest way to start is with the sample: Download template (.csv). Columns:

Headers may be in English or Polish and in any order. Empty cells take the settings from the form.

Groups and synced labs

Groups mirror how teaching is organised: year → semester → course → class. Create a group with New group and place it in the tree with Inside group. Add people with Add members: one by one, from a file (columns as above, without dates), from another group or from USOS. A member is a student or a trainer (Make trainer / Make student).

A lab generated with a synced group follows the group for as long as it runs:

• a new group member gets an environment straight away,
• someone removed from the group loses their environment (machines and data) — the only way to take a group member off the lab,
• a role change in the group changes the role in the lab,
• the lab's group cannot be changed once generated; people added to the lab directly are never touched by the sync.

While labs that follow a group are running, changing its members also needs permission to manage labs. A group that labs were generated for cannot be deleted — Archive it instead.

Running a lab

A lab's page shows its details and the participants table (which refreshes itself every few seconds).

• Participant status: Pending (environment being prepared), Ready, Disabled.
• Add participant — the same form as when generating; new people join the running lab.
• Edit (on a participant) — the person's details, end date, schedule, disable date, time limit. Start date and time zone can change only before the environment is created.
• Access page — opens the participant's page in their language.
• Remove — deletes the participant's environment and data. Members of a synced group are removed from the group instead.
• Edit lab — the name and the End date: this is how you extend or shorten the lab; the new date applies to every participant.
• End lab — ends the lab now: every machine and the data on it is deleted immediately. The lab stays in the list as Completed. This cannot be undone.
• An ended lab — whether ended this way or because its end date has passed — is read-only: its participants and dates no longer change and no invitations go out. You can still rename it, message its participants and export its usage report.
• Trainer's login hours — when the trainer has set the lab's hours on their page, they show here (read-only).

Invitations and messages to participants

• The invitation with the access page link is sent by itself when a participant's environment is ready.
• Resend invitation — for the ticked participants; Send invitations — for everyone. People whose environment is still being prepared are skipped.
• Send message — an organisational message (for example a changed class date) to everyone or the ticked participants. Plain text; each person gets their own copy. A sent message cannot be recalled.
• The invitations' wording is set by an organisation administrator (Email templates).

Time used and the usage report

The Time used column shows each participant's working time and, with a limit, "used / limit" and a Limit reached badge. Export usage (CSV) downloads the report for the whole lab: person, role, dates, limit, time used and time left (in minutes).

Login schedules

Schedules are weekly windows in which students may use their lab. Create one (New schedule, windows in 15-minute steps) and choose it in a participant's Login schedule field. Outside the windows a student cannot connect, and when a window ends they are signed out. Hours are in the environment's time zone. Deleting a schedule lifts the restriction from every environment that used it. No windows means no restriction.

Which schedule applies

A schedule can be given to a student (their own) and to the whole lab (when it is generated — the organisation's shared schedule). A trainer can also give the lab hours of its own. What applies:

• The trainer's hours saved and switched on — only those. They replace both the student's schedule and the lab's schedule set by the operator.
• The trainer's hours off — the windows of the student's schedule and, if the lab has a schedule attached and switched on, its windows too: the student may connect in the windows of both.
• No windows (or the trainer's hours switched on without windows) — no restriction. Trainers are never restricted.

The trainer's first save gives the lab a schedule of its own, copying the windows of the shared one; the shared schedule itself is not changed and keeps applying in other labs, but stops applying in this lab. The portal has no action that restores it on the lab; you can, however, change the schedule of individual participants.

Templates and instructions

• New templates and their machines are created in the Lab Deployment Tool (Windows) — the Download Lab Deployment Tool button on the templates list. The tool only creates templates and uploads machines; everything else happens in the portal.
• Edit — name, code, description, important information, requirements.
• The Machines tab — each machine's CPU count, memory and internet access. Machine names and disks are not changed in the portal.
• Archive — the template is no longer offered when generating labs; existing labs carry on. Restore undoes it. Templates are never deleted.
• Disabled — the CloudLabs services have stopped creating machines from the template after four failures in a row; labs made from it wait. The template's page shows the last error. Once the cause is fixed (usually by the system administrator), select Enable template.
• The Instructions tab — the modules, exercises and steps participants see. Add them by hand (Add module, an exercise, Add step) or import a CSV with the columns Module, Exercise, Step (Download a sample (.csv); importing replaces the whole outline). Steps are plain text. Print or save as PDF gives a printable version.

The printable version on the access page always shows the current instructions. The panel on the desktop shows a copy made when the environment became ready — there, a change reaches only environments prepared afterwards.

Participants and trainers

The Participants module has the lists Students and Trainers — everyone who has taken part in the organisation's labs — with search and details (assigned labs, time used). The lists are for viewing; people are changed in labs and groups.

Monitoring

• Infrastructure — current CPU, memory and disk use and the number of active users.
• Lab environments — every active environment with its account, host and access page link. VLAN / ID is the VLAN an environment's machines share; it is also part of their names, so it tells you which machines in the cluster belong to whom. An environment with a single machine has no lab network: its number, 10000 and above, is not a VLAN and only identifies its machines.
• Alerts — status against the thresholds. Email notifications is your personal subscription (warnings and critical, or critical only); Thresholds are changed by someone allowed to manage monitoring.
• History — usage over the last 24 hours, 7 or 30 days.

More help

If something does not work as described here, see: Troubleshooting.