How to Configure Topology Templates

Topology templates instruct the system on how to parse your organization's server hostnames and extract meaningful metadata, such as the Environment, Service, and Sequence (Pod) number.

By properly configuring these templates, your dashboard will automatically categorize incoming assets.

The Template Editor

You can manage templates from the Administration Panel under the Topology section. The Template Builder provides a visual interface for constructing your parsing rules.

Available Placeholders (Tags)

When building a template, you construct a sequence of placeholders that represents the structure of your hostnames.

• :env — Extracts the Environment name (e.g., prod, dev, staging).
• :svc — Extracts the Service name (e.g., db, api-gateway, frontend).
• :seq — Extracts the Sequence or Pod number (e.g., 01, 02, 18).
• :any — The wildcard placeholder. It tells the engine to explicitly ignore any text in this position. This is extremely useful for skipping data centers, region codes, or company prefixes.

**Dynamic Indexing:** You can place `:env`, `:svc`, and `:seq` in **any

arbitrary order**. The matching engine uses dynamic capture group indexing and will correctly assign the extracted values based on the order you define in the template.

Using the Logical OR (|) Operator

To avoid creating dozens of identical templates for different services, you can group multiple matching values into a single rule using the pipe character (|) as a logical OR operator.

For example, if your naming convention dictates that hostnames start with the service name followed by the environment, but you have three different APIs:

1. Navigate to the Topology template builder.
2. Set the template structure to: :svc-:env-:seq
3. In the Service Match Value field, input your identifiers separated by a pipe: auth-api|payment-api|inventory-api

When a hostname like payment-api-prod-02 reports in, the engine will dynamically evaluate the | delimited list, match payment-api as the :svc, prod as the :env, and 02 as the :seq.

Example Configurations

Scenario A: Strict Environment-Service-Sequence

• Hostname: prod-web-01
• Template Structure: :env-:svc-:seq
• Environment Value: prod
• Service Value: web

Scenario B: Ignoring Region Codes

• Hostname: us-east-db-staging-05
• Template Structure: :any-:svc-:env-:seq
• Environment Value: staging
• Service Value: db
• Result: The engine ignores us-east, identifies the service as db, the environment as staging, and the sequence as 05.

Scenario C: Grouping Multiple Environments

• Hostname: cache-qa-02
• Template Structure: :svc-:env-:seq
• Environment Value: dev|qa|staging
• Service Value: cache
• Result: The single template will successfully capture hostnames for the cache service across all three non-production environments.