# Contacts

Much like [tenancy](./tenancy.md), contact assignment enables you to track ownership of resources modeled in NetBox. A contact represents an individual responsible for a resource within the context of its assigned role.

```mermaid
flowchart TD
    ContactGroup --> ContactGroup & Contact
    ContactRole & Contact --> assignment([Assignment])
    assignment --> Object

click Contact "../../models/tenancy/contact/"
click ContactGroup "../../models/tenancy/contactgroup/"
click ContactRole "../../models/tenancy/contactrole/"
```

## Contact Groups

Contacts can be grouped arbitrarily into a recursive hierarchy, and a contact can be assigned to a group at any level within the hierarchy.

## Contact Roles

A contact role defines the relationship of a contact to an assigned object. For example, you might define roles for administrative, operational, and emergency contacts.

## Contacts

A contact should represent an individual or permanent point of contact. Each contact must define a name, and may optionally include a title, phone number, email address, and related details.

Contacts are reused for assignments, so each unique contact must be created only once and can be assigned to any number of NetBox objects, and there is no limit to the number of assigned contacts an object may have. Most core objects in NetBox can have contacts assigned to them.

The following models support the assignment of contacts:

* circuits.Circuit
* circuits.Provider
* circuits.ProviderAccount
* dcim.Device
* dcim.Location
* dcim.Manufacturer
* dcim.PowerPanel
* dcim.Rack
* dcim.Region
* dcim.Site
* dcim.SiteGroup
* tenancy.Tenant
* virtualization.Cluster
* virtualization.ClusterGroup
* virtualization.VirtualMachine

### Bulk Assignment

Contacts can be assigned to or removed from many objects at once using the bulk edit form of any supported object type. When adding contacts, a role (and optionally a priority) must be selected to apply to each new assignment. If a contact is already assigned to an object with the selected role, no duplicate is created; instead, the selected priority (if any) is applied to the existing assignment. Removing a contact deletes all of its assignments to the selected objects, regardless of role. Removals are processed before additions, so a contact's role can be replaced in a single operation.

When importing contact assignments in bulk, contacts are matched by name by default. Where contact names are not unique, use the `contact.id` column header to reference contacts by their numeric ID instead.