Mostly our users search via hostname or substring of the host name.
In my personal use of maas, I tend to jump between the subnets and machines pages and if I don’t do these in separate tabs I get my thumb twiddling session(s), esp as the environment is more built out. . For other users, they are usually only on the machines page or a page for a specific machine, and if they don’t those in separate tabs they get hit with the same penalty if you go back to the list expecting it to already be there…
The internal automation tool I wrote (maasterblaster) largely keeps users from needing to interact with the GUI, mainly because the experience on 2.6 was so terribly sluggish and fraught with weird rendering anomalies. but in many cases they might need to go to the gui to look at machine logs to find out why something wouldn’t image properly or to throw something into rescue mode.