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Overview

What Netforge.ai is and how the pieces fit together.

Relevant for:Pre-Sales / DesignProfessional ServicesEnterprise / NetOpsAdmin / Owner

Netforge.ai turns a drawing into a working network. You design the topology on a visual canvas, describe intent in vendor-neutral terms (VLANs, routing, AAA, monitoring…), and the platform renders production-ready, per-vendor configuration — Cisco IOS-XE and NX-OS, Arista EOS, ArubaOS-CX, Palo Alto PAN-OS, and Terraform for Azure — while continuously validating the design against engineering best practice.

The core loop#

1 · DesignPlace devices from the vendor catalog on the canvas and cable their ports. Group devices into Site Areas that share common settings.
2 · ConfigureFill in each device’s property tabs (Interfaces, L2, L3, Features, Management, Monitoring…) — or define once on a Site Area and let devices inherit.
3 · ValidateThree validation layers run over the design: inline field checks, whole-design checks (duplicate IPs, STP roots, undefined object references…), and render-time checks.
4 · GenerateProduce complete per-vendor CLI for every device — plus BOM, cabling schedule, and a design document.
5 · Publish / DeployPublish the finished design (private or public/scrubbed), export artifacts, or push toward deployment.

Design principles#

  • Vendor-neutral intent, vendor-correct output. You configure what (an ACL, a TACACS+ server, a tracked static route); each vendor template renders how in its own dialect.
  • Inheritance over repetition. Organization-wide standards (NTP, AAA, SNMP, syslog, users, password policy) live on a Site Area or project defaults; devices inherit and can override.
  • Secrets are never stored. Passwords and shared keys render as a literal PLACEHOLDER for the operator to substitute — designs stay safe to share.
  • Validation is advisory but honest. If a platform cannot render an option, it is omitted from that config and flagged — never silently invented.
Why
Keeping intent vendor-neutral is what makes multi-vendor estates manageable: one design language, reviewed once, rendered correctly per platform — instead of hand-maintaining five dialects of the same standard and hoping they stay in sync.