Best practice for managing over hundred monitors

mckeont · June 2, 2026, 8:22pm

Hi all,

I’m new to AirGradient and have been enjoying learning how the system works for a work project. I set up one AirGradient One as a test unit and successfully connected it to the dashboard.

We’re planning to deploy around a hundred monitors for a community indoor air‑quality program. Since residents will install the monitors themselves, I need a way to view all the data centrally, similar to how I can see my test monitor. The challenge is that my current dashboard requires logging in with my personal credentials, and sharing those credentials with participants isn’t an option.

What’s the recommended approach for aggregating data from many monitors into a single dashboard? I see that I can add multiple devices to my account, but I’m unsure how that works when the monitors are distributed across many different users. Has anyone done something similiar and suggested path forward?

Tai_AirGradient · June 3, 2026, 12:32am

Hi @mckeont, to manage all monitor in a single centralized dashboard, as well as give the accessibility to the residents, you can add more users to your dashboard and assign user-specific permissions. Each user will have to create their own AirGradient account (with their own email) to join your centralized dashboard, so you don’t have to share your credentials (email & password) with them.

You can do this in ‘User & Permissions’ menu on the AirGradient Dashboard:

When you click ‘Add New’ at the top right of the page, you’ll be able to add an email and assign specific permissions to the account associated with that email address.

The highest rank here is the General Admin who will be able to manage everything in this Place ID (the whole dashboard). General Admin can connect a new monitor to the dashboard, can remove, unlink, ect.

Also might be worth mentioning, there are some terminologies used in the Dashboard that I think is good to know:

"Place" is the whole dashboard. A Dashboard has only 1 Place ID. You can see your Place ID in ‘General Settings’

"Location" is where an AirGradient monitor linked to. You can set up location name to your needs. Locations always need a ‘Hardware’ (a monitor) linked to be active. If there’s no ‘Hardware’ linked, ‘Location’ will just gray out, shows no numbers.

"Hardware" is each monitor themselves. You will have to assign (link) each ‘Hardware’ to a specific ‘Location’

So the basic concept is that when you click ‘Connect a Monitor’ (left) menu on the Dashboard. It will guide you through steps to connect your monitors and they will eventually up and running on your dashboard.
During those processes, ‘Location’ and ‘Hardware’ are silently created behind the scenes.

Now let’s talk about your specific deployment, the most efficient way is to register all the monitors to your Dashboard prior to distribution (using ‘Connect a Monitor’ menu on the AirGradient Dashboard). You don’t need the monitor to be online at this step. You just need their model numbers, and serial numbers. We are just registering (telling the Dashboard to remember that this one monitor is already registered to it, so when the monitor goes online (no matter where it is located in, which Wi-Fi network it connected to), the dashboard will take that data from the monitor). Do this with all your monitors before distribution.

After distribution, the residents can simply connect each AirGradient monitor to their home Wi-Fi (without touching the Dashbord). Once the monitor connected to Wi-Fi that has the internet connection, It will eventually shows up online and report data to your centralized Dashboard.

When all set, you can invite those residents as a Dashboard user (without Admin rights) as we mentioned above, so they can see the dashboard, but they won’t be able to add, remove, change settings.

Alternatively, if you prefer not to assign dashboard user to them (just want them to access area-specific air quality data without accessing your whole Dashboard), you can create a ‘Public Displays’ to share the public links with them.

I hope this helps!

mckeont · June 4, 2026, 2:55pm

Hi @Tai_AirGradient — thank you for such a thoughtful reply. This is extremely helpful.

I’m thinking through how to make the setup process as simple as possible for residents, and pre‑registering the serial and model numbers before distribution seems like a good approach. I’m also wondering whether having residents register the monitors with their own email addresses would complicate troubleshooting.

Is it possible to use a non‑admin email that all residents could use during installation, and then have me, as the admin, add that shared resident email to my account? Or would that create conflicts in how the monitors appear in the dashboard?

Tai_AirGradient · June 4, 2026, 5:07pm

Hi @mckeont, I’m glad that it’s helpful!

Regarding the approach you mentioned (please feel free to let me know if I misunderstood something), you can create an email (just one email), then use this email to create an AirGradient account (which this AirGradient account will later be used as a ‘shared account’ for all residents to log into the AirGradient Dashboard).

Then you can add this new email to your centralized dashboard as a user (whether with or without admin rights). (To add this user, you need to log in with your main AirGradient account (the one that you don’t want to share the credentials and that has admin rights)).

Note: I recommend that you open a private window on your web browser (incognito window), or use a separate web browser, or a separate Chrome profile (if you use Google Chrome) to manage two AirGradient accounts simultaneously on the same computer, so you don’t have to log out and log in back and forth.

A non-admin user cannot register a new monitor (no ‘Connect a Monitor’ on the side menu). You can see the images below as an example of what they will see as a normal user of the Dashboard (non-admin). However, this approach may still be helpful if your purpose is not to let the residents register the monitors (as you might already have preregistered the monitors, as the approach we mentioned previously), but only for monitoring purposes (to see if the monitor goes online or not when the residents connect them to Wi-Fi).

Scrolling down a bit to see the monitor listing…

When they tap the gear icon on the right of each monitor, they will be able to see more details, but there is no button for them to edit anything. (In your case, there won’t be the ‘Sim Card Information’ as you’ll use Wi-Fi.)

If your intention is to have the residents register the monitors themselves, you need to grant this AirGradient account the admin permission.

I apologize for a lot of redundancy in my explanation as I try to make it as clear as possible.

To conclude that, if you plan to preregister the monitor (recommended) and just want the residents to log into the Dashboard for ‘monitoring purposes’, you can give the residents this shared AirGradient account without granting admin permission. But if you want them to register the monitor themselves, this shared account needs to have admin permission. (You can change the permission later at any time).

Additionally, after everything settles, the ‘Public Displays’ will be very helpful in this case to share each location with the residents and the community.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any more questions, or you can also contact us if you need something in particular. Our team and I are always happy to help!