Getting your account

Everything else in these docs starts at “sign in”. This page is what happens before that.

There is no self-signup for Argus, deliberately. An account is created for your organisation, and you receive a one-time link to finish it. That link is the only thing that creates your first user - nobody at Argus sets your password, and nobody at Argus can sign in as you.

The four steps

1. We create your tenant. It exists as a named, empty account - no users, nothing to sign in to.
2. We send you a setup link. One-time, valid for 24 hours by default.
3. You complete setup. You choose your own email, name and password. This creates the tenant owner.
4. You enrol two-factor, then land on the setup checklist - which is where Quickstart picks up.

Completing setup

Opening the link shows your organisation’s name, its domain and the contact address the account was created against, before you type anything. If those details are not yours, do not continue - tell us instead. Seeing your own organisation named back to you is how you know the link is genuinely ours.

You then choose:

• the email address you will sign in with
• your full name
• a password - at least 12 characters, and it has to clear the strength rules

The link is consumed once you finish. If it expires or you lose it, ask us for another - they are single-use and scoped to your account, so re-issuing costs nothing.

You become the tenant owner

The user created at this step is the tenant owner. That role sits above every permission in your account: it is the seat that can grant and revoke everyone else’s access, and it is not something Argus assigns to itself.

If ownership needs to move later - someone leaves, or the wrong person completed setup - that is a transfer we can perform for you, and the new owner must already have two-factor enabled.

Two-factor is mandatory

Have an authenticator app open before you first sign in. Two-factor is required for every Argus user and there is no way to defer it: your first sign-in goes straight to enrolment, and you cannot reach the product until it is done.

During enrolment you are issued backup codes. Store them somewhere you can reach without your phone - they are the only recovery route you control. After that, recovery means contacting us.

Adding your team

Once you are in, you invite your own people and assign their roles. Argus is not involved: the tenant owner and any administrator you designate manage users from Settings. See Users and roles for what each role can do.

If a partner manages your account

Some Argus accounts are run by a managed service provider on the customer’s behalf. If that is your arrangement, steps 2 and 3 above may not apply to you at all: your partner may have created the account themselves and taken it live, and they operate it for you. You may not hold a tenant owner seat, and you may not need to log in at all until you choose to.

What holds in that arrangement regardless:

• Partner staff never become your tenant owner. That seat is structurally unavailable to them, in your account and in every other.
• Your own people stay yours. A partner cannot create, invite, remove or change the roles of users in your organisation; those actions belong to you.
• Your notification policies bind them too. A mandatory notification setting you configure applies to partner staff working inside your account the same as to your own team.
• Work can be handed back. If your partner cannot finish an alert or an incident, they can return it to your queue. It arrives unassigned, and everyone on your side who can act on it is notified in the app and by email.
• The account can be handed over. If you later take the account on directly, ask us for a setup link: you complete the setup step above and become the owner, and only then is the partner detached. We will not detach a partner from a live account that has no owner yet, because that would leave nobody administering it.
• You can end the partner’s access yourself, from the delegation panel in your console; your partner is told.

If you are not sure which arrangement you are on, ask your partner or ask us - the customers list in your console names the partner managing you, if there is one.

What to have ready

• the email address that should own the account, and access to its inbox
• an authenticator app on a device you have with you
• somewhere safe for the backup codes
• for the steps after this, cloud credentials - see Quickstart