Administration

Permissions

Topology Studio follows TrackMe’s standard three-role model:

Role	What it can do
trackme_user	Open and consume shared views (live status, inspector, full-screen, deep links).
trackme_power	Everything above, plus author: create views, edit views they have write access to, and manage Topology Alerts on those views.
trackme_admin	Everything, on every view.

Per-view access — read/write split

Each view carries two role lists:

• Read roles — who sees the view on the landing page and can open it.

• Write roles — who can edit the canvas, change the view’s settings, and manage its alerts.

The view’s creator always retains access to their own view, and administrators always see everything. Alert management is tied to write access — being able to read a map does not grant the right to change how it alerts.

Tenant isolation

A topology view can reference entities from many tenants — but viewing a map never extends anyone’s tenant permissions. Live status is enforced server-side, per node, against the caller’s tenant visibility:

• Nodes referencing tenants the caller can see behave normally.

• Nodes referencing tenants the caller cannot see return a restricted marker only — no entity identity, no state, no counts. The UI renders them as neutral restricted nodes.

• Aggregates spanning visible and non-visible tenants fold only the visible scopes, and report how many scopes were withheld.

Important

This makes cross-team maps safe to share broadly: everyone sees the same topology shape, while the live data each person receives is exactly what their tenant permissions allow — enforced in the backend, not the browser.

Licensing

Topology Studio is available to the Foundation, Enterprise and Unlimited editions alike (and to active trials) — the complete experience, including authoring: creating, editing, duplicating, importing and sharing views, and managing Topology Alerts. Foundation access was opened in TrackMe 2.4.12; earlier 2.4.x releases mistakenly restricted authoring to Enterprise and Unlimited.

The only license gate is TrackMe’s product-wide license read-only mode, entered when the license expires:

• Creating, modifying and deleting views and alerts is refused (the REST API answers HTTP 402).

• Consuming keeps working — existing views stay listed and open live, with the inspector, full-screen, deep links and exports available as usual.

Export, import and portability

Views are portable:

• Export produces a single archive containing the graph, the background image and the view’s alert definitions — everything travels together.

• Import recreates the view on any TrackMe instance (staging → production, instance migrations, sharing between deployments), optionally under a new view id. Imports are size-capped and fully re-validated on arrival — an imported view obeys the same rules as one authored in place.

Topology views are stored in global KV store collections, so they are automatically included in TrackMe’s backup & restore cycle.

System-wide settings

From TrackMe 2.4.9, six Topology Studio controls are admin-configurable, deployment-wide — under Configuration → System settings → Topology Studio (the [topology_studio] stanza of trackme_settings.conf):

Setting	Default	Controls
topology_versions_retention	30	Restorable versions kept per view. Every save is a version; older versions beyond this count are pruned on save.
topology_refresh_interval_seconds	60	Base cadence of the canvas live-status refresh. This is the floor, not a fixed rate — the adaptive engine only ever stretches the interval on views that are slow to evaluate.
topology_icon_max_count	100	Capacity of the deployment-wide custom icon catalog.
topology_background_max_kb	2048	Maximum size of an uploaded canvas background image, in kilobytes.
topology_alert_runs_retention	50	Evaluations kept per topology alert in the run history, pruned after each run.
topology_snapshot_max_rows	50000	Maximum entity rows read per (tenant, component) snapshot when resolving live status and evaluating alerts. When a source is capped, aggregates report truncated rather than pretending the roll-up is exact. Raise only on very large estates with KV store capacity to match.

Every consumer reads these settings fail-safe: a missing or invalid value falls back to the shipped default, and values are clamped server-side to a sane range — a broken setting can never take Topology Studio down. Each setting also carries its own learn more documentation directly in the System settings page.

Operational internals

For administrators who want to know what’s running under the hood:

• Storage — views, background assets, version history, alert definitions, alert state and run history live in dedicated global KV store collections (kv_trackme_topology_*). Version snapshots are bounded per view and pruned automatically on save; deleting a view cascades its alerts, assets and versions.

• Alert execution — each Topology Alert materializes as its own scheduled saved search running the evaluation command on the alert’s cron schedule. The saved search is owned by the system (nobody) and kept private, so end-user searches never gain direct access to the Topology KV store collections; the alert’s creator remains the authorization principal — their power permissions, write access to the view and tenant visibility are re-verified on every run, and a creator who lost access skips the run (state untouched) rather than producing a false all-clear. Enable/disable in the UI schedules/unschedules it; per-alert run locks prevent overlapping evaluations (a run now and a scheduled run coordinate rather than collide).

• Notable events — every alert transition (open / update / resolve) is indexed under sourcetype=trackme:topology_alerts in the alert’s own configured event index; when left on the deployment default, events land in TrackMe’s summary index ([index_settings] trackme_summary_idx, trackme_summary unless changed). The TrackMe notable index is reserved for the notable alert action — Topology Alerts never write to it. See Topology Alerts for the event payload and the UI shortcuts that open the events.

• Email rendering — the emailed topology image is rendered server-side; no browser involved, no external service.

Hint

If an alert’s saved search drifts (deleted or altered outside TrackMe), the scheduling layer detects and self-heals it on the next management-surface interaction.