Organizations form the structural backbone of your workspace, enabling you to model complex business relationships through flexible hierarchical trees. This system is powerful enough to support everything from simple department structures to intricate, multi-tier partner networks.

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Understanding Organization Structure

Organizations can be nested up to 10 levels deep, with each organization able to have up to 100 direct children. This creates a tree structure where:
  • Parent organizations can have visibility into the total resource consumption of all their descendants.
  • Child organizations inherit certain settings and are governed by limits set by their parents.
  • Resource usage is automatically aggregated and “flows up” the hierarchy from children to parents.
  • Resource limits cascade down from parents to children, with the most restrictive limit always taking precedence.

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Usage Tracking and Aggregation

A core feature of the hierarchy is automatic usage aggregation. This ensures that at any level, you have a complete view of resource consumption. Every organization tracks two types of usage:
  • Direct Usage: Resources consumed directly by the organization itself, excluding any of its children.
  • Subtree Usage: The total of an organization’s Direct Usage plus the Subtree Usage of all its direct children.
This “bubbling up” provides a real-time, aggregated view of resource consumption throughout the entire hierarchy. In this corrected example:
  • Engineering’s subtree usage (75) is the sum of its own direct usage (5) and the direct usage of its children (30 + 40).
  • Sales’s subtree usage (50) is the sum of its own direct usage (10) and its children’s usage (15 + 25).
  • Company HQ’s subtree usage (135) is the sum of its own direct usage (10) and the total subtree usage of its direct children, Engineering (75) and Sales (50).

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Limit Enforcement

Limits are a powerful tool for controlling resource consumption at any level of the hierarchy. The system enforces limits using a “most restrictive” approach.

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How Limits Work

An organization’s effective limit for a given resource is the minimum value derived from the following three sources:
  1. The total subscription capacity provided by the relevant billing account.
  2. The specific limit set on the organization itself.
  3. Any limits set on its parent organizations, all the way up to the root.
A crucial detail is how limits are interpreted:
  • Limit Not Set (null): The organization inherits the limit from its parent or, if it’s a top-level org, directly from the subscription. This allows resources to flow freely.
  • Limit Set to 0: This is an explicit denial. The organization and all its descendants are blocked from using that specific resource, regardless of any higher limits.
  • Limit Set to > 0: A specific cap is enforced. This limit cannot exceed the capacity inherited from its parent or the subscription.
In this scenario:
  • Team 1: Is restricted to its own explicit limit of 30.
  • Team 2: Has no limit set, so it inherits the 50 user limit from its parent, Division 1.
  • Team 3: Requests a limit of 60, but its parent (Division 1) has a more restrictive limit of 50. Therefore, its effective limit is 50.
  • Team 4: Inherits its limit from the first parent with a set limit, which is the Root Org, giving it an effective limit of 80.

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Practical Use Cases

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Multi-Tier Reseller Network

Ideal for software vendors managing channel partners. You can set a license limit for a primary distributor, who can then set more restrictive limits for their resellers, and so on. Usage rolls up automatically, giving you perfect visibility into your channel’s performance.

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Enterprise Department Structure

Model complex corporate hierarchies for regional resource allocation, departmental budgeting, and enforcing compliance boundaries across geographic locations.

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Franchise Operations

Organize franchise locations by region and district, enabling regional management, district-level reporting, and store-specific limits, all while maintaining franchise-wide visibility.

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Best Practices

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Designing Your Hierarchy

  1. Mirror Your Business Structure: Use organization names that reflect your actual business units and reporting lines. This makes the system intuitive for your users.
  2. Keep it as Shallow as Possible: While the system supports deep nesting, shallower hierarchies are easier to manage and understand.
  3. Plan for Reorganization: Consider how your business might evolve. Plan organization moves carefully, as they impact usage aggregation and limit inheritance.

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Managing Organizations

  1. Monitor Usage: Regularly review subtree usage to understand consumption patterns and use the data for capacity planning.
  2. Set Alerts: Proactively monitor when organizations are approaching their limits to avoid service disruptions.

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Technical Considerations

  • Consistency: All updates to the hierarchy and its usage counters are performed using atomic operations to ensure data integrity, even in high-concurrency environments.
  • Performance: The system is optimized to handle deep hierarchies and large numbers of organizations without performance degradation, using efficient path-based queries instead of slow, recursive lookups.
  • Auditability: All modifications to organizations, limits, and usage are logged, providing a clear audit trail.