How to use NIZU Cloud Infrastructure

1. Add your first asset

1. Open Cloud Infrastructure → Assets and click Add asset.
2. The form is five short steps. In Identity, give it the name your team uses (for example hel1-prod-01), pick its type, environment and criticality.
3. In Placement, fill in the hostname and IP, the provider and region, and the client and project it is run for. Everything here is optional.
4. In Specs, enter vCPU, RAM, disk and operating system if you know them.
5. In Cost & billing, enter the net cost per billing cycle and the renewal date.
6. In Lifecycle & notes, add purchase and warranty dates and anything the next person should know. Click Save and open the asset.

Mark an asset Critical when it matters. Critical assets with no uptime monitor are flagged on the dashboard until somebody links one.

2. Or import a spreadsheet

Click Import CSV on the assets page, download the template, fill it in, and paste or upload it. The preview shows what will be created and what will be updated (matching on provider id, then on name) before anything is written.

3. Link the asset to what it is related to

On the asset page, click Add link. Choose what you are linking — another asset, a client, a project, a Password Manager credential, a Terminal connection, an uptime monitor, a domain, a database, a file, a ticket — then search for the record and pick the relationship (hosted on, depends on, serves, credentials for, monitors, ...).

To see whether an asset is alive, open its Monitoring tab and click Add monitor. If NizuUptime already watches that hostname or IP, the monitor is offered for linking; otherwise a new one is created (HTTPS, HTTP, TCP or ping), linked to the asset and checked once immediately. The asset's header, the assets list, the project and client tabs and the client portal all show an Up / Down badge from then on, and Check now re-runs the check outside the schedule. On the dashboard, Match monitors by host links every asset to the monitors that already watch its hostname or IP, and Down now lists the assets whose monitor is currently failing.

The Relationships tab lists every link. The Credentials tab shows the linked credentials and terminal connections; the Monitoring tab shows the linked uptime monitors with their current status. If a linked credential or monitor disagrees with the asset about the hostname, a warning appears at the top of the asset page.

4. Post the cost to expenses

When an asset has a cost, the Post to expenses button books it in the Expenses module. Enter the net amount and choose the tax; the tax is applied on top. Leave Recurring ticked for monthly and yearly plans — NIZU generates every following cycle by itself, so you post once. Tick Billable to recharge it to the client; the expense can then be added to their invoice from the Expenses module.

The Costs tab of the asset lists every expense posted from it.

5. Read the reports

Costs in the left menu shows the monthly and yearly run-rate grouped by client, project, provider, environment or type. Reconciliation compares, per provider and per month, the planned cost of its assets with the expenses actually posted, and lists assets with no expense and decommissioned assets whose expense still recurs.

6. Sync with a provider

Open Provider sync. Every provider from the Providers App is listed — the ones with an API first, the rest folded away. Click Credentials on a provider to choose which API it speaks (detected from the name when possible) and to manage its API keys.

A provider can hold several keys. This matters at Hetzner, where a token is scoped to one project: add one key per project (give each a label such as the project name) and every sync reads all of them, so nothing is left out. Each key is tested the moment you save it and keeps its last result next to it; you can re-test or remove a key from the list. A token stored before this feature existed appears as the Default key.

Then click Test on the provider any time to re-check every key, and Compare. The difference table shows new, changed, unchanged and vanished assets, and which key sees each one. Tick what you want and click Apply selected. Vanished assets are proposed for Decommissioned and are never deleted — and nothing is proposed as vanished while one of the keys fails to answer, so a broken key can never make a whole project look gone.

7. Decommission an asset

Edit the asset and set its status to Decommissioned. The date is filled in for you. If the asset still has a cost or a recurring expense, the dashboard and the daily digest keep reminding you until the expense is stopped in the Expenses module.

8. Give a client access (optional)

Switch on the client portal in the App's settings. Then open the client, go to the Infrastructure access tab, and choose for each contact what they may see: their assets, the specs, the costs, the monitoring status. Credentials are never shown to clients. The contact then sees My infrastructure in their portal menu.

9. Ask Marvin

With the Marvin App active, ask "what runs on hel1-prod-01?" or "what is linked to the shop database?" and Marvin answers from the catalogue, with the same permissions you have.