TRE Platform Administrator Guide
Overview
The TRE Platform Administrator sits at the top of the TRE administrative hierarchy. Where the TRE Infrastructure Administrator provisions infrastructure and the TRE Administrator handles day-to-day operational governance, the Platform Administrator is responsible for who can use the platform, what they can spend, and how the platform behaves system-wide.
This guide is organized as a sequence of activities that mirror how a Platform Administrator typically sets up and runs a TRE deployment. The first four activities are foundational and have dependencies — you should complete them roughly in order. The last three are operational and ongoing.
Navigation Menu
The Platform Administrator app shows the following items in the left-hand navigation panel:
| Menu Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Users | Onboard new users, manage their organizational placement, and update roles. |
| Projects | Create and oversee the projects in which researchers conduct their work. |
| Budget | Define the organizational hierarchy (via the Organization Structure screen inside this tab) and allocate budgets at group, unit, and user levels. |
| Cost | Monitor expenditures across the organization, with filtering by team, project, and time range. |
| Audit Logs | Audit user activity, modifications, access events, and security incidents. |
| Settings | Configure platform-wide controls for approval workflows, budget enforcement, notifications, and metadata. |
Note: Although Budget appears as a single navigation item, the Organization Structure is configured inside the Budget tab. You can define your hierarchy here before allocating any budgets against it.
Activities
Foundational setup
- Defining the Organization Structure — Establish the Organization → Group → Business Unit/Department hierarchy that everything else depends on.
- Allocating Budgets — Create budgets and sub-allocate them across the structure you've just defined.
- Onboarding Users — Add users to the platform and place them within the organizational hierarchy.
- Creating Projects — Set up the projects in which research work will happen.
Configuration and oversight
- Configuring Platform Controls — Set per-area approval workflows, notification rules, and automation behavior.
- Monitoring Platform Cost — Track spending by team, project, and user across the platform.
- Reviewing Audit Logs — Audit user activity and system events for compliance and security.
How this guide fits with the other administrator roles
- The TRE Infrastructure Administrator provisions the infrastructure — datasets, computes, workstation templates — that the projects you create here will consume.
- The TRE Administrator handles day-to-day operational governance, including adding members to the projects you create and approving the requests that your platform controls route to them.
- The Getting Started with Quark TRE guide describes the researcher-facing experience that all three administrative roles support.