The Canvas

Place nodes, connect ports, and lay out your topology.

Placing devices#

The catalog is grouped by vendor and family. Click a device to drop it at the next free spot, or drag it exactly where you want it. The sidebar auto-minimizes to a thin rail — hover to expand it, or pin it open. Search inside the catalog filters across every vendor at once.

Connecting ports#

Drag from one device's connection point to another to cable them. Connection points zoom on hover so they are easy to hit even on a dense drawing. When the link is made, the Link Editorassigns real interfaces on both ends — pick from each device's actual port inventory (derived from its model), the media type (copper, SFP+, QSFP, DAC…), and the speed.

• Link speeds: 1 / 10 / 25 / 40 / 100 / 400 Gbps — the chosen speed renders on the drawing and drives BOM optic selection.
• Validation: media vs. port-cage mismatches (e.g. a QSFP optic in an SFP+ cage) and speed mismatches are flagged, with one-click fixes where a matching free port exists.
• Double-click a link (or right-click → Edit) to reopen the Link Editor later.

How links draw#

The canvas works to keep a dense topology readable the way a hand-drawn reference diagram is:

• One stroke per port-channel. The members of a bundle draw as a single line with a Po1 · 4×100G pill, so an MLAG pair reads as one link, not eight. Right-click the stroke to see every member; deleting it deletes the whole bundle. Path traces and failure simulation light the stroke whenever any member is on the path.
• Links leave from the facing edge. A link to the row below leaves from the bottom of the box and arrives at the top of its peer — and the connection points themselves move to that face, so a spine presents its downlinks along its underside instead of stacking them down one side.
• Links route around devices. Where a straight line would cut through an unrelated device, the link takes a squared detour through the aisles between rows instead. Several runs sharing an aisle fan apart into parallel tracks, the way a wiring diagram fans a harness. Routing never runs while you drag — the drawing settles a moment after you let go.
• Except where straight is correct. A full leaf–spine mesh keeps its straight diagonal fan on purpose: 128 pairs bent through one aisle would draw as a barcode, and the straight fan is how every fabric vendor draws a Clos.

The console layer#

Console runs to a terminal server fan across every tier and can be half the lines on a small site's drawing. When a canvas has console runs, an amber Console pill appears next to Site area — click it to hide the console layer while reading the data topology, and again to bring it back. It is purely a view setting: the runs stay in the design, validation, the BOM, and every export.

The Key#

The drawing encodes meaning in colour, dash, and labels — stroke colour by media, amber dash for console, violet for management, a long dash for admin-down, the Po pill, dashed site-area borders. The collapsed Key pill expands into the legend that explains all of it, the way a printed reference diagram carries one in its corner.

Layout & bulk editing#

• Auto-layout arranges the topology hierarchically (core → distribution → access) when a drawing gets tangled, wrapping wide tiers into even rows (8 + 8, never 11 + 5).
• Tier bands label each row behind the drawing — and take their name from your devices when names disagree with roles, so a collapsed core built from leaf hardware reads Core, not Leaf.
• Multi-select (drag a box or shift-click) opens the bulk-edit panel to apply changes across many devices at once.
• Undo/redo covers node, link, and config changes.
• PNG export captures a clean, framed image of the drawing — tier bands included — for proposals and docs.

Site / Region areas#

A site area is a named region on the canvas (e.g. HQ-LON). Every device inside it is tagged with the site's scope code and inherits the site's shared configuration — AAA, NTP, DNS, SNMP, syslog, local users, banner and more. Devices can override any inherited value. See Site Areas & Inheritance for the full model.

The button sizes the box around the devices on the current tab, so it works straight away. Move it by its header chip and resize it from the handle in the bottom-right corner. A device belongs to the area whose rectangle its centre falls inside, and the innermost area wins when they nest — so an area drawn beside your devices rather than around them does nothing, and Validate says so.

Select the area to edit it. General holds its name and scope code plus a summary of what it currently shares; Management holds AAA, local users, NTP, DNS, SSH and the console/VTY lines; Monitoring holds SNMP and syslog; Advanced holds the banners.

Site tabs (multi-canvas)#

A project can also span multiple canvases — one tab per site plus a WAN Overview — via the tab bar above the canvas. Tabs can bind to a site the same way drawn areas do, and the Blueprint wizard generates whole multi-site networks in this shape. See Site Tabs & the Overview for the full model.