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Docs/Guide/Site Areas & Inheritance

Site Areas & Inheritance

Define shared settings once; every device inside inherits them.

Relevant for:Enterprise / NetOpsProfessional Services
Where to find itCanvas toolbar→Draw site area→Select the area→Property tabs

A Site Area is a named region of the canvas (e.g. HQ-LON) whose configuration every device inside it inherits. The area's panel uses the same tab layout as a device — General, Management, Monitoring, Advanced — so each setting lives where you already expect it.

What can be shared#

The full management plane: domain & DNS, timezone, AAA (model, servers with timeout/retransmit/VRF, source interface), password policy, local users, NTP (servers, prefer, authentication, access-group), console/VTY lines, CDP/LLDP, SNMP, syslog, and the login banner.

Precedence#

Device valueAlways wins. Typing a value on the device overrides everything.
Site AreaFills any field the device leaves blank.
Project defaultsFills anything neither device nor site sets.

Device tabs show inherited values as placeholders with an “inherited from <site>”hint, and list-type settings (AAA servers, local users) inherit wholesale — defining any on the device replaces the site's list entirely.

Why
This is how real organizations run: one regional standard (auth, time, logging) applied to every box, with rare, explicit exceptions. Encoding the standard once eliminates the copy-paste drift that audits invariably find — and when the standard changes, you change it in one place and regenerate.
Tip
Validation checks inherited values against each member's platform — e.g. a Common-Criteria password policy on a site containing Nexus switches warns that per-count minimums are IOS-only.