Device roles

What a role is

A role captures what a device is for — a spine switch, a firewall, a PDU — independent of its model. Roles drive parts of the design review (for example, flagging a leaf with no uplink to any spine) and keep an estate legible at a glance.

Three tiers that stack

The Role dropdown in the device inspector offers a single grouped list built from three sources:

• Base roles — a broad built-in set grouped by Compute, Network, Storage and Facility & infrastructure. It covers most estates out of the box: Server, Hypervisor, Spine switch, Leaf switch, Top-of-rack switch, Router, Firewall, Load balancer, Storage array, PDU, UPS, Patch panel and more.
• Organisation roles — a shared list your org curates once and reuses across every project, so a whole team standardises on the same vocabulary.
• Project roles — extra roles specific to a single estate, stored with the project document.

Any legacy free-text role already on a device is preserved and always shown in its own dropdown, so a value can never silently disappear.

Assigning and managing roles

Select a device and pick its role from the inspector's Role dropdown. To extend the vocabulary, manage the organisation and project role lists under Settings → Device roles. Duplicates (case-insensitive) and blanks are cleaned up on save, so the shared list stays tidy.