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Platform — Overview

Before the Platform Table and the rest of this section, it helps to know what a platform actually is — the model everything else in Admin builds on.

Permission level: Admin

What is a Platform​

A platform is one physical thing in the field — a vehicle, a kiosk, a tablet, a workstation. Every platform is made of one or more devices, each one a running instance of the GetApp agent. Each agent carries its own identity (a device ID, a device type) and, when it's part of a multi-device platform, a shared platform ID — the value every device belonging to the same physical asset reports in common.

  • A device with no platform ID is simply its own single-device platform.
  • When several devices share a platform ID, one of them is confirmed as the orchestrator — the platform's master — through an enrollment handshake between the agents; the rest become its children. From that point on, the master owns the platform's identity: its name and its type come from the master, not from any individual child.

This is exactly what the dashboard mirrors: Platform Table shows one row per platform (never a bare child device), and Platform Information aggregates installed software, events, and metadata across every member device — because that's what the platform actually is, not just its master.

Device metadata vs. platform metadata​

Not everything a device reports belongs to the platform. A device's own name and miscellaneous local metadata stay device-owned even when that device is a platform's master; only the platform's own name and shared metadata are treated as platform-level. This is why Platform Information's metadata list can show platform-wide values alongside per-member device detail without the two getting mixed up.

See also​