Admin Guide
Role Overview
The Admin is responsible for platform-wide governance on Quark V3 — managing users, organising projects, allocating budgets, and maintaining the audit trail that underpins compliance and security. Where the DS Administrator works within the boundaries of a project to support researchers directly, the Admin defines those boundaries.
Navigation Menu
When logged in as an Admin, the left-hand navigation pane provides access to the following sections:
| Menu Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Cost | Monitor platform-wide budget allocation and resource expenditure. View spend by group, project, team, and user across any date range. |
| Projects | Create and manage projects that organise pipeline resources and enforce team-level access controls. Each project gets its own isolated pipelines, files, members, and budget allocation. |
| Budget | Set and manage budget policies per project or team. Configure spending caps and alert thresholds, and visualise how budgets cascade through the organisation's hierarchy. |
| User Activity | Review a platform-wide activity dashboard showing onboarding trends, compute usage, and a filterable breakdown of what users are doing across all projects. |
| Users | Invite new platform members, assign global roles, and manage existing user accounts — including deactivating users who no longer need access. |
| Audit Logs | Access the immutable record of every API call and UI action across the platform. Filter by user, action, resource, and date range to support compliance, security, and forensic investigation. |
Core Responsibilities
User and Access Management
The Admin is the entry point for all platform access. Inviting users, assigning them to projects, and setting their roles are Admin responsibilities. Keeping the user directory accurate — and removing access promptly when it is no longer needed — is essential to maintaining a least-privilege access posture across the platform.
Budget Governance
The Admin allocates spending budgets to projects and teams, and configures the alert thresholds that notify stakeholders before spend approaches its limit. The Cost and Budget sections work together: Budget is where policies are set; Cost is where their effect is monitored in real time.
Project Organisation
Projects are the primary organisational unit on Quark V3. The Admin creates and manages projects, ensuring that each has the right members, the right access controls, and a budget allocation appropriate to its scope. DS Administrators operate within the projects the Admin defines.
Compliance and Audit Oversight
Quark maintains an immutable audit log of every action taken on the platform. Reviewing this log — and correlating it with User Activity data — is the Admin's primary tool for compliance reporting, security investigations, and identifying unusual or unauthorised behaviour.
Suggested Starting Point
- Invite users and assign their global roles — Users
- Create the project or projects the team will work within — Projects
- Allocate a budget to each project and set alert thresholds — Budget
- Verify spend is tracking as expected after initial activity — Cost
- Set a regular cadence for reviewing User Activity and Audit Logs — User Activity | Audit Logs