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Maps & sites

Under Maps, Vesana visualizes your infrastructure on three levels:

  • World map — landing page with site pins and live status per site

  • Logical map — dependency graph of your hosts, checks, and collectors, with live status and alerting effect

  • Physical map — floor plan or photo as background, hosts placed freely, purely visual

Plus aggregates (K-of-N redundancy) as their own objects on the logical map.

World map

/map starts on a real geo map. There you see:

  • Site pins with a status rollup: every pin carries a proportional status bar of its hosts. It only turns red when the site is "down" — i.e. all its active hosts are CRITICAL or measured unreachable. Maintenance windows and accepted exceptions don't count as a problem.
  • Popup per site: number of hosts, status bar ("site unreachable" when down), the list Maps at this location (logical first, then physical, told apart by icon) and below it Without location (tenant) for the tenant's maps without a site. Assign hosts (permission hosts.edit) assigns hosts in bulk with search — the same assignment exists on the tenant page.
  • The site tile shows the distribution of host states as a bar (like a host tile), not "one red host = the whole site red".
  • Map list below the geo map, grouped by tenant and within that split into "Logical maps" and "Physical maps", with a search over the map names.

Online vs. offline map tiles

The world map loads its tiles from OpenFreeMap — no key, no setting — or, offline, draws only country and region outlines, for instances whose browsers have no internet access. If you maintain a firewall/proxy allow list: allow tiles.openfreemap.org and tile.openstreetmap.org (the latter for browsers without WebGL 2, see below; the former provider CARTO is no longer used).

The online/offline switch applies instance-wide; super admins find it as a button at the bottom left of the world map ("Online maps active — switch to offline"). The map style is selectable — Automatic (theme) (default, light/dark follows the theme), Colorful, Light, Dark — and is remembered per browser.

Browsers without WebGL 2 (virtual machines without a graphics card)

The online map is drawn with WebGL 2. Every current browser provides it on a machine with a graphics card — virtual machines without a graphics card often don't (typically: Windows or Linux VMs, remote desktop, Firefox with blocked hardware acceleration). There the browser only gets the older WebGL 1.

Vesana detects this on its own and then shows the same street map as image tiles from OpenStreetMap — site pins, popups and search work as usual. Two differences stand out:

  • The map style is the OpenStreetMap standard style, not the selectable style of the regular map; the style picker is hidden in that case.
  • In dark mode the map is darkened with a colour filter.

The full map inside the VM too

Firefox often blocks WebGL 2 on virtual-machine graphics drivers only as a precaution. To enable it:

  1. Open about:config in the address bar and accept the warning.
  2. Search for webgl.force-enabled and set it to true.
  3. Restart Firefox.

WebGL 2 then often runs in software, and the world map looks the same as on a machine with a graphics card. Whether this works depends on the VM's graphics driver — if it doesn't, the OpenStreetMap map remains.

Why this used to work without WebGL 2

Up to Vesana 1.9.452 the world map used an older version of its map library (MapLibre 4), which fell back to WebGL 1 when WebGL 2 was missing. The current version (MapLibre 6) closes a critical security vulnerability but no longer supports WebGL 1 — hence the fallback to OpenStreetMap tiles.

Sites

A site is the geographic source of truth for its hosts:

  • You create sites in tenant management (name + place search → coordinates); the host form has a site field as a shortcut.
  • A host inherits its site's position. A host's own coordinates override the site for that one host — when creating it under "More details", later under Manage host → General ("Custom location override (optional)").
  • Every map can be attached to exactly one site — physical and logical alike. That is how you find it again via the site pin on the world map; maps without a site are listed separately in the popup under "No site".
  • An open map only knows its own tenant: "Seed" (place all hosts), the palette and the dependency candidates only pull devices of that tenant. The tenant switch in the header applies to the overview only, not inside an open map.
  • Deleting a site deletes no hosts — they only lose the site assignment.

"Show on map"

From a host you can jump directly to the map it's placed on. If it's on several maps, Vesana asks which one; logical maps take priority. If it's on none, the first logical map opens.

Decorative elements: purely visual, never alerting

On both map types you can decorate without touching the alerting logic:

Element What it is
Text Free text field (size S–XXL, alignment, bold)
Object Freely named decorative node with a shape (rectangle, cloud, cylinder, circle, diamond, shield), e.g. "internet", "provider firewall"
Decorative line Visual line without effect (logical map: "Visual line only" in the confirmation dialog)
Arrow Drawn arrow, movable and resizable as a whole (physical maps only)
Image Movable/resizable image (physical maps only)

Decoration has no effect

Decorative nodes and decorative edges are pure drawing. They never trigger alerts, suppression (inhibition), or status rollups — even if an arrow visually looks like a dependency. Dependencies with alerting effect only ever come from the logical map through confirmed edges between real objects.

In edit mode, decorative edges and arrows can be labeled or deleted with a click or right-click.

Versions

Every position or structure change on a map creates a snapshot when saved (the last 50 are kept). Under versions you restore an earlier state — the restore itself creates a new version, nothing is ever lost. Deleted maps land in the trash and are recoverable there for 30 days.

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