Views, Layers & Overlays

As a diagram grows, the value isn’t in seeing everything at once — it’s in being able to ask focused questions of it. Strata’s Layers & Views and Overlays controls (in the left panel) let you filter, re-style, and analyze the graph without changing the underlying model.

Layers & filters

Filter what’s on screen by:

• Relationship class — toggle Network, Data flow, Dependency, Permission, and Observability edges on or off. Each class has its own colour and line style.
• Service category — show or hide whole categories (compute, storage, database, …).

The filter mode decides what happens to filtered-out elements:

• Dim — keep them visible but greyed back, so they stay as context.
• Hide — remove them from the view entirely.

Edge style

Switch edges between Curved (smooth bezier) and Orthogonal (right-angle routing) under Edges — orthogonal often reads better for dense, grid-like layouts.

View presets

One click applies a curated combination of the filters above:

• All — everything visible.
• Network — emphasize network connectivity.
• Security — emphasize permission relationships.
• Data flow — emphasize data movement.
• High-level — collapse containers for an at-a-glance overview.

Saved views

Set up the filters you like, type a name under Save current as…, and save it. Saved views are stored in your browser and can be re-applied or deleted later.

Environment tint

Toggle Environment tint to colour nodes by their account/environment — prod, staging, dev, and so on — so multi-account or multi-environment diagrams are easy to read at a glance.

Analytical overlays

Overlays trace the relationship graph to answer a specific question, lighting the relevant resources and dimming the rest. They’re selection-aware — select a node first to trace from it; with nothing selected they show the whole picture.

• IAM trust — follows permission edges (allows, assumes, grants) to show the trust chain.
• Network paths — follows traffic-bearing edges (routes_to, connects_to, peers_with, attached_to, and load-balancer targets) to show reachability. Connections that cross the internet boundary — those touching an Internet Gateway, NAT Gateway, CloudFront, API Gateway, or an internet-facing load balancer — are drawn orange (external), and the internet-facing nodes get an orange ring; everything else stays blue (internal). A small legend appears in the panel. If there are no network relationships yet, the overlay is a no-op (it won’t dim the canvas) and a hint explains why.
• Heat (degree) — tints each node by how many connections it has, surfacing the busiest hubs in the architecture.
• None — clears the overlay.

Overlays are a topology view derived from the diagram’s relationships — they trace the edges you’ve drawn or imported, not live security-group rules or real traffic.

Presentation mode

Click ▶ in the toolbar (or run Presentation mode from the command palette) to enter a clean, read-only view for sharing or demos: the palette is hidden and editing is disabled, but you can still pan, zoom, and click nodes to inspect them. Click Exit presentation to return to editing.