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Views and diagrams
Kumo.io draws your diagrams for you. A view is a diagram of one environment, generated from a revision by a view template and regenerated after every sync, so it shows what Kumo.io last observed rather than what someone remembered to draw.
Templates, views and renderings
Three pieces make a diagram:
| Piece | What it is | In the web app |
|---|---|---|
| View template | A reusable recipe: which kinds of resource appear, what is pulled in around them, how they nest, and how each is drawn. | Template, when you create a diagram |
| View | One template applied to one environment, such as the network topology of your production VPC. | A diagram |
| Rendering | The drawing for one revision of that environment. Each one is kept. | A diagram snapshot |
Because renderings are tied to revisions, you never update a diagram by hand. A new sync produces a new revision, and Kumo.io draws from it.
When diagrams are drawn
After every sync, Kumo.io:
- Identifies the environments in the new revision.
- Evaluates each environment against the revision.
- Draws a diagram for each environment from every built-in template that suits it.
A template only draws an environment that contains what the template is about. A Kubernetes service map needs Kubernetes workloads, and a security view needs security group rules, for example. That's why different environments get different sets of diagrams.
You can also draw one yourself. Under Diagrams, select Create Diagram, choose the workspace and environment, and select New Diagram. (An environment that has no diagrams yet also offers Create Diagram on its own page.) Under How Should It Be Built? choose:
- Auto-Generate (Recommended): Kumo.io picks the templates that match this environment and renders its default diagrams.
- From a Template: choose one Template and give the Diagram Name. Kumo.io draws it from the environment's latest snapshot.
Diagrams you generate yourself count toward your plan's monthly diagram-generation limit. See Plans and limits.
The built-in templates
Kumo.io ships ten view templates. Each one answers a different question.
| Template | The question it answers | Drawn for environments that contain |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | What do we have, and where does it live? Everything in the environment, grouped by provider, account and region. | Any compute instances, storage buckets, databases or VPCs. It has no further condition. |
| Network topology | How is the network laid out? Where each workload sits inside its VPCs and subnets. | A VPC or subnet holding workloads, such as instances, clusters, services, functions, load balancers or databases. |
| Network fabric | How are network segments wired together? Each VPC as a sealed box, with the peering, transit gateways, VPN gateways, internet and NAT gateways and endpoints between them. | Peering connections, transit gateways or VPN gateways. |
| Public exposure | What can the internet reach, and what stands in the way? The paths from each front door through its guards to the workloads behind it. | Load balancers, public (elastic) IPs, CDN distributions, gateways or REST and HTTP APIs. |
| Security | Who may talk to whom, on which ports? Security groups as lanes, with port-labelled arrows for the traffic their rules allow. | Security group rules. |
| Identity & trust | Who can act as what, and what can they then do? Workloads, people, roles, groups, policies and policy statements in lanes. | IAM roles, users, groups or service accounts. |
| Application dependency | What does this application depend on, and what depends on it? Resources grouped into the applications they belong to. | Application compute or an API surface: functions, services, task definitions, instances, clusters, REST or HTTP APIs, or state machines. |
| Data flow | Where does data live, and how does it move? Data stores and the queues, topics, streams and workflows that move data between them. | Queues, topics, event buses, subscriptions, streams, delivery streams, state machines or storage buckets. |
| Kubernetes service map | How does traffic reach your workloads, and what do they need to run? Layers from ingress through services and workloads to storage. | Kubernetes deployments, stateful sets, daemon sets or pods. |
| Hostname surface | What domain names does the estate expose, and what serves, secures and resolves each one? Every domain name as a hub, with its load balancers, CDNs, certificates and DNS records. | Hostnames, load balancers, CDN distributions, certificates, DNS records or REST and HTTP APIs. |
Under Diagrams, you can filter the gallery by Workspace, Environment, Diagram Type, Provider and Origin. Diagrams you create and name yourself appear under the Custom diagram type.
Reading a diagram
Open any diagram to see it full screen. The bar along the top has:
- Snapshots, a strip of every rendering of this diagram, newest first, with thumbnails. Pick one to see the diagram as it was. Arrow keys step through them. The line under the bar tells you whether you're looking at the Latest available rendering or an Earlier snapshot, when it was drawn, and when the data behind it was observed. Open Latest brings you back.
- Explore and Edit. Explore is the default, so a shared link never opens in an editor. Edit changes how the diagram is drawn, not your resources. It is only available on the latest rendering; earlier ones are read-only.
- Export and Share, covered below.
The Diagrams page covers editing, overlays and annotations in detail.
What your plan changes
| Plan | Diagrams |
|---|---|
| Trial | Every diagram is drawn, but the diagram view blurs some of the resources and adds a watermark. Diagrams can't be exported or shared until the trial converts to a paid plan, and the same holds while read-only after a trial ends. |
| Team, Business, Enterprise | Full detail. Export as SVG, PNG, PDF and VSDX (Visio), and share with a public link. |
| Enterprise (Licensed) | Full detail. Export as SVG, PNG, PDF and VSDX. |
To export, open a diagram and select Export. PNG has a Size of 1×, 2× or 4× and a Background of Transparent, Dark or White. Exports are drawn from the rendering you're looking at. See Exports and Sharing.
On a self-hosted installation you can also write the latest renderings to disk as SVG from the command line:
kumo view list
kumo view export --format svg --out ./diagramskumo view export exports every view you can read by default. Use --workspace or --environment to narrow it. SVG is the only format the command writes today.
Shaping what a diagram includes
Each template carries a context query, which decides what is drawn around an environment's resources and how they nest, for example whether instances sit inside their subnets and VPCs. You can try your own on an environment's page with Explore & Apply Context. See Context queries.