Guide for PIs & Lab Managers

This guide covers what PIs, lab managers, and team leads need from bioAF, visibility into team activity, cost oversight, and audit compliance.

The dashboard

Your first stop is the Dashboard. It shows:

  • Active pipeline runs and their progress
  • Running notebook sessions
  • Recent team activity
  • Quick links to experiments and results

Dashboard showing active runs, sessions, and recent activity feed

Tracking team activity

The Activity Feed (accessible from the dashboard or the sidebar) shows a chronological stream of everything happening on the platform:

  • Experiments created and updated
  • Pipelines launched and completed
  • Samples added and data uploaded
  • Status changes and reviews

You can filter by team member, experiment, or date range.

Activity feed showing recent team events with timestamps and user attribution

Monitoring costs

The Cost Center

Navigate to Admin > Cost Center for a complete view of your cloud spending:

  • Total spend this billing period
  • Per-component breakdown: see exactly what’s driving costs (compute, storage, database, etc.)
  • Per-project costs: track spending by experiment or project
  • Trend charts: spending over time with projections
  • Budget status: how close you are to your set threshold

Cost Center showing spending breakdown by component, trend chart, and budget indicator

Setting budget alerts

  1. Go to Admin > Cost Center > Budgets
  2. Set a monthly budget threshold
  3. Choose notification channels (email, Slack, in-app)
  4. bioAF alerts you when spending reaches 50%, 80%, and 100% of your budget
i Where do these costs come from?
bioAF runs on your Google Cloud project. The costs shown in the Cost Center are pulled directly from your GCP billing data, they're the same numbers you'd see in the Google Cloud console, but organized by bioAF component so you can see what's driving spend.

Using the audit log

The Audit Log provides an immutable record of every action taken on the platform. This is critical for:

  • Publication provenance: trace any result back to the exact experiment, samples, pipeline version, and parameters that produced it
  • Regulatory compliance: demonstrate a complete chain of custody for your data
  • Troubleshooting: see exactly what happened and when

Audit log showing filterable list of events with user, action, resource, and timestamp

Each audit entry includes:

  • Who performed the action
  • What they did (in plain language)
  • Which resource was affected
  • When it happened
  • Additional context (parameter changes, status transitions, etc.)

You can filter by user, action type, resource, or date range, and export the log for external reporting.

Managing users and roles

Adding users

Navigate to Admin > Users and click Add User. Assign one of the built-in roles or a custom role.

Built-in roles

Role Access level
Admin Full platform access including user management, component provisioning, and settings
Computational Biologist Run pipelines, launch notebooks, manage environments, full data access
Scientist Register experiments, add samples, upload data, view results
Viewer Read-only access to experiments, results, and files

Custom roles

For more granular control, create custom roles under Admin > Roles. You can grant or deny access per resource type and action (create, read, update, delete).

User management page showing team members with roles

Reviewing results

You don’t need to run pipelines yourself to review the output. From any experiment:

  • Open QC dashboards to check sequencing quality
  • Launch cellxgene to explore single-cell embeddings interactively
  • Browse the plot archive for publication-ready figures
  • Download reports for offline review or sharing