Most core objects within NetBox's data model support _tenancy_. This is the association of an object with a particular tenant to convey ownership or dependency. For example, an enterprise might represent its internal business units as tenants, whereas a managed services provider might create a tenant in NetBox to represent each of its customers.
Tenants can be grouped by any logic that your use case demands, and groups can be nested recursively for maximum flexibility. For example, You might define a parent "Customers" group with child groups "Current" and "Past" within it. A tenant can be assigned to a group at any level within the hierarchy.
Typically, the tenant model is used to represent a customer or internal organization, however it can be used for whatever purpose meets your needs.
Most core objects within NetBox can be assigned to particular tenant, so this model provides a very convenient way to correlate ownership across object types. For example, each of your customers might have its own racks, devices, IP addresses, circuits and so on: These can all be easily tracked via tenant assignment.
Tenant assignment is used to signify the ownership of an object in NetBox. As such, each object may only be owned by a single tenant. For example, if you have a firewall dedicated to a particular customer, you would assign it to the tenant which represents that customer. However, if the firewall serves multiple customers, it doesn't *belong* to any particular customer, so tenant assignment would not be appropriate.
