Previewing a client portal
Before you hand a client the keys to their portal, you'll want to see what's behind the door. The console lets any staff member — admin or engineer — open a client's portal exactly as that client's users see it.
Opening a preview
On the Clients list, each client has a Preview portal action. It opens the client's portal in a dialog right there in the console — sign in as nobody, configure nothing.
Two honesty guarantees make the preview trustworthy:
- It's the real page. The preview renders the same portal component with the same live data that a signed-in client user gets — not a mock-up or a screenshot. If a monitor shows degraded in the preview, it shows degraded to the client at that same moment.
- It's always labelled. The dialog names which client you're viewing; opened as a page of its own, the portal carries a preview banner naming the client. You can't mistake a preview for your own console view, or for another client's.
The preview is as read-only as the portal itself, and it's a staff view — it doesn't create a session for the client, doesn't count as a client visit, and needs no invite to exist. You're looking through their window, not signing in as them.
Before inviting the first user
The preview is the natural last step before sending an invite. One minute of looking answers the questions that otherwise become awkward emails later:
- Right monitors, right sites. Does the portal show everything the client pays you to watch — and nothing that isn't theirs? Remember that monitors without a site never appear in any portal; if something's missing here, its site attachment is the first thing to check.
- Names that make sense. Monitor names are what clients read. "srv-dc2-bkp-old" means something to you; their operations manager should see "Backup server — Dammam office". Check both languages if their team reads both.
- Branding in place. Your logo, their logo, the overall banner showing a sensible month uptime.
Fix what you find, refresh the preview, then invite.
When a client calls confused
"The portal says something is down" — the preview turns that call from guesswork into a shared screen. Open their portal and you're looking at exactly what they're looking at, live: the same banner, the same monitor rows, the same incident list. No "can you send me a screenshot", no translating between what you see in the console and what they see in the portal.
It's also the honest way to check what a client can deduce. The portal shows their last 10 incidents with full body text — before assuming a client hasn't noticed last week's outage, open their preview and read what they can read.
When the view needs changing
The preview shows you the truth; changing it happens elsewhere. Monitor names and site attachments are edited on the monitor itself, the client's logo on the client's page, and your workspace name and logo in workspace settings and branding. After any of those changes, the preview is how you confirm the client-facing result matches what you intended.