Channels Overview
A Channel represents a channel partner or reseller that owns a group of tenants. Channels are an optional middle tier in the SecureLink hierarchy, sitting between the platform operator and individual customer tenants:
SuperAdmin > ChannelAdmin > TenantAdmin
A channel lets you delegate management of a set of tenants to a partner's administrators (ChannelAdmins) without granting them platform-wide access.
What is a Channel?
A channel is an ownership grouping over tenants. When a tenant belongs to a channel:
- ChannelAdmins of that channel can manage the tenant and all its resources
- The tenant is isolated from other channels — a ChannelAdmin never sees tenants outside the channels they administer
- The platform operator (SuperAdmin) retains full access across all channels and tenants
A tenant belongs to at most one channel. A tenant with no channel is called a direct tenant and is visible only to SuperAdmins.
Channel List
The Channels page (/admin/channels) lists channels in the system:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | The display name of the channel (partner or reseller) |
| Status | Current status: Active or Suspended |
| Tenants | Number of tenants assigned to this channel |
SuperAdmins see all channels with full management controls. ChannelAdmins see only the channels they administer, as a read-only list, and open one to work with its tenants.
Click a channel to open its detail page, which has up to three tabs:
- Overview — channel name, status, and summary
- Tenants — the tenants assigned to this channel
- Administrators — the ChannelAdmins assigned to this channel (SuperAdmin only)
Channel Scoping
Channel scope is resolved from channel membership, which is stored as a many-to-many relationship — one ChannelAdmin can administer several channels, and the platform computes their reachable tenants by joining the channels they administer to the tenants in those channels.
- An admin with no channel membership sees nothing — the system fails closed and never treats an empty membership as unrestricted access.
- Membership is evaluated on every request, not cached from the login token, so adding or removing a channel from an admin takes effect immediately.
For the full picture of what a channel administrator can and cannot do, see ChannelAdmin Access.
Direct Tenants
Tenants created without a channel (channel_id is empty) are direct tenants:
- They are managed exclusively by SuperAdmins
- They never appear to any ChannelAdmin, including in the tenant selector
- Existing tenants are not automatically assigned to a channel — a fresh deployment's tenants remain direct until a SuperAdmin assigns them
- A direct tenant can be assigned to a channel later, and a tenant in a channel can be returned to direct
Choosing a tenant's channel at creation, moving it to another channel, and returning it to direct are all SuperAdmin operations. See Moving a Tenant Between Channels.
Relationship to Tenants
Channels sit one tier above tenants. Everything documented in Tenant Management — tenant isolation, edges, users, configuration — still applies to a tenant regardless of whether it belongs to a channel. The channel only determines who can administer the tenant below the SuperAdmin level.