Contacts¶

Contacts are the people and teams responsible for your infrastructure - and you can attach them to almost any object (a site, a device, and more) in a specific role and priority.

You build it in three layers: contact groups and contact roles (how you organize and classify contacts), the contacts themselves, and then attaching a contact to the objects it's responsible for.

Add a contact group or role¶

• A contact group bundles related contacts together - for example by team, vendor, or department.
• A contact role describes the capacity a contact acts in - technical, billing, on-call, and so on.

For either, open the matching page under Organization in the sidebar (Contact groups or Contact roles), click Add, give it a name and slug, and save.

Contact groups can nest: pick a parent group on the form to build a tree (Vendors → Carriers → Acme NOC). A group can't be its own ancestor - Danbyte blocks cycles - and NetBox contact-group trees import losslessly.

Add a contact¶

1. Open Organization → Contacts and click Add contact.
2. Give it a name (must be unique).
3. Optionally fill in the title, phone, email, address, and a link (such as a profile or ticket queue), and put it in a group. Phone numbers render as tel: links wherever they show, so a click places the call through your desk's softphone or Teams; e-mail addresses are mailto: links the same way.
4. Optionally set working hours - see below.
5. Save.

Working hours¶

A contact can record when they are actually reachable, so at 02:00 you can see who is on shift instead of guessing. Tick the days they work, set a start and end time on each, and pick the time zone those times are stated in. The zone is required once any hours are set: without it "08:00-17:00" cannot answer whether they are reachable right now, which is the whole point of the field, so Danbyte refuses the half-set state rather than storing a schedule that reads as unknown forever.

Two presets cover the usual shapes: Mon-Fri 08-17 and 24/7. A day can hold more than one span - press + on a day to add a break, so 08:00-12:00, 13:00-17:00 records a desk that closes for lunch. Spans on a day may not overlap; they are sorted for you.

The contact's page then shows the hours as one line - Mon-Fri 08:00-17:00 Europe/Copenhagen - with an Available now or Outside hours badge beside it.

The same two things are columns on the Contacts list - Working hours and Available - off by default; turn them on from the Columns menu, and the layout is remembered like any other table's.

Attach a contact to an object¶

Once a contact exists, attach it to the things it's responsible for. Open the detail page of a site or device and go to its Contacts tab.

1. Click to attach a contact.
2. Pick the contact.
3. Choose the role it acts in here (technical, billing, …).
4. Set a priority - primary, secondary, tertiary, or inactive.
5. Save.

The same contact can be attached to many objects, each with its own role and priority. To remove an attachment, detach it from that object's Contacts tab.

Open a contact group¶

Clicking a name in Organization → Contact groups opens that group's detail page. Because groups nest, the page is how you walk the tree: the parent is a link under the title (up one level), and the Child groups tab is the way down.

• Overview - name, slug, description, the parent group, and the two counts the tabs list.
• Child groups - the groups nested directly under this one, one hop, not the whole subtree. Each row links to its own page, so you walk deeper a level at a time. Powered by GET /api/contact-groups/?parent=<id>.
• Contacts - every contact in this group, using the same table the main Contacts page draws (minus the redundant Group column). This is the list to read before you rename or delete a group: it is what the delete guard counts.
• Journal - your notes on this group.
• Change log - the automatic record of changes to the row.

Both counts are one hop, not a subtree total, so the numbers on the tabs and the rows in the tables can never disagree.

Open a contact role¶

Clicking a name in Organization → Contact roles opens that role's detail page, the same way every other object in Danbyte works.

• Overview - the role's name, slug, how many attachments use it, and when it was created and last changed.
• Assignments - every contact attached to something in this role, with a link to the contact, the object it's attached to, and the priority. This is the list to read before you rename or delete a role: it is exactly what the delete guard is counting.
• Journal - your notes on this role.
• Change log - who changed which field, and when. Danbyte has been recording this since roles were added.

Tags & custom fields¶

Need to track something extra - a Slack handle, an escalation tier, working hours? Add a custom field for contacts and it appears on every form. See Tags & custom fields.