Zones Management

Overview

Manage zones by using the Inventory ► Zones page.

A zone is an arbitrary container in which groups of peers can be kept and organized according to their network address.

Each peer being attributed a zone, a conversation between two peers comes with two zones: a client and a server zone.

The zone has a name and layer tags that can be edited. The priority is set on a per rule basis. Each conversation is tagged with a client and server zone (using the client and server IP and MAC addresses) according to this process: every rule is tried in order of priority, and the first zone that has filters that comply with this conversation is selected. Thus, it may be important to consider the priority of a zone in the rare occurrence where the default ordering scheme does not yield the expected results.

Whatever changes are made in the zone tree, a global fallback will be created by default to store any conversation that is not matched by any rule (this remains true even after filters are added for the zone).

Zone tree as displayed in Skylight sensor: capture select boxes, showing the default configuration.

Selections

Zone names play an important role in the GUI. They are organised in a tree of sub-names delimited with slashes (/), not unlike a standard file system. In all select boxes of the GUI, selecting a parent zone will select all conversations that fall in this zone or in any of its child zones.

Tips

Searching

From the search bar at the top of your screen, you can search​ for any specific zone. While searching, you can use the Collapse all button to have a quick glimpse of your results if you had too many zone drop-down menus, for example, or the Expand all button if you have to dig a little deeper.

Tip: You can search zones by name, MAC address, Subnet, and VLAN fields.

Adding a new zone

To add a new zone, there is a ➕ button at the top-right corner of the Zones view. The newly added zone will be at the top of your list; you can edit and add rules to it.

Regarding zone selection, you have flags. If a parent has a specific flag or value set, the child will inherit those specific values and they cannot be edited. However, values that have not been inherited from the parent can be edited.

Editing a zone and its rules

When you select a zone, you may edit (such as its name) and update the zone if necessary. Clicking the ellipsis (...), you will be presented with the following Action menu options:

• Add zone: You can add a new child zone.
• Move zone: You can move a zone if needed, such as if you were to incorrectly configure a zone.
• Clone zone: You can replicate an already exisiting zone with identical configurations.
• Delete zone: You can delete a zone if necessary. That being said, zones currently in use cannot be deleted.

Much like zones themselves, the rules within a zone can be cloned or removed; you can also add additional rules. Many of the configuration settings have tooltips explaining their purpose.

When making changes, you will encounter confirmation dialogs that will, depending on the current state, provide you with a warning so that you do not lose your data; you will be required to either cancel or save your changes, depending on what you are attempting to do.

Fallbacks

By convention, a fallback is a zone with a larger filter but lower priority than a set of more specific rules. The priority of the fallback must be lower than the priority of these smaller zones; otherwise, they would be shadowed by the fallback.

Using the Fallback naming convention allows one to select either a specific server, all servers, or only the other servers other than the ones specified.

Importing and Exporting Data

To import and restore zones

1. Click the ellipsis (...) menu in the top-right corner of the page and select Import and restore.
   

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   CAUTION: You are not simply importing additional zones, but also deleting zones that are not included in that file. Zones that are included in that file will be set to that version. This is less of an import and more of an import and restore because it will reset the whole zone state to whatever the input files provided.

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• This will prompt you to select a JSON or CSV file that will result in replacing all the contents.

2. Select the JSON or CSV file you wish to import by clicking Select file... and then Open. This will display the name of the chosen file.

3. Click Import zones.
   

• You will be notified of all the zones that have been imported.

To export zones

1. Click the ellipsis (...) menu in the top-right.
2. Select the option for your preferred file format:
   • Export as CSV
   • Export as JSON
     An editable file will be downloaded.