Hey good morning everybody it's Vicious I hope you're doing well today and if not at least by the end of this video you can say that you're well informed. So this is going to be a short two-part video tutorial series about making a network diagram. So in this very first video it's going to be a very basic tutorial on how to use a free program called Draw.io to build out yourself a network diagram.
The second video is going to be an advanced video. It's going to involve registry changes and writing a simple program so that we can take our diagram and make it interactive so that we can launch programs and stuff on our network diagram. So the basic diagram looks like this. This took me about an hour to make, and I have never used the program before. When I was looking for information on how to use the program, I really couldn't find any good tutorials.
Most of them were at least a couple of years old, and they were just not very informative. They were mostly those infomercial type videos where there's no one talking, no one explaining, it's just moving around with some crappy music playing. So today we'll go through directions on how to use the basics on this program. Now it's fairly easy to use, I'm sure you could figure it out on your own, but I'll give you some pointers to at least give you a head start so that it won't take you an hour to make your first diagram, maybe less than 30 minutes. So the diagram, let me talk about the interactive piece of it.
Built right into Draw.io, I found this out just by luck. is the ability to create links using web URLs. So if I want to click on, say, one of my Ubiquiti access points, I can have that take me directly to the URL that takes me to my Unify.
Other things that have web interfaces, let's say we want to go to my ESXi host and go to my ESXi page. So that's built right in. So anything with a web interface, like a web URL, that's built right in. So we'll cover that today in this video. The advanced piece, the part that I'm going to show you in the next video, is how I take that same functionality and let it give me the capability of doing something like launching an SSH session to my switch.
And that's what I'll cover in the next video and that's a lot more in depth so we can't cover both in the same video. So let's go into the tutorial now. So what we want to talk about is Draw.io.
Why Draw.io? Well it was a free program so unlike Visio, which is what I use at work, and Gliffy, those both cost money. as I was looking for alternatives, somebody at work told me about Draw.io and I checked it out.
It's very basic, but that's all you really need. And it doesn't do just network diagrams. You can do flow charts and any other kind of diagramming you can think of.
But for me, network diagram is what I wanted. And it does that very well. Now to get to Draw.io, it's actually a fully online.
Let me just pull it up here. Everything on on here. You can save it to your OneDrive. You can save it to your local computer.
You can save it to Google Drive. And everything is right here. Literally, it runs out of your internet browser online and you can do everything online.
So that is how it was originally designed. But at some point in time, somebody also made it so you can download an offline version and launch it locally. So that's what I have done.
So I have a shortcut here on my desktop that will launch the local version, which is exactly the same thing. but everything is living local. I just prefer that. You never know if you're working on your laptop, you might want to do this offline and I just prefer to run it locally. So let me give you the links to everything real quick.
So let's open up a new browser window. And so the main page is going to be draw.io. So HTTPS colon slash slash draw.io will take you to that online version.
And for that offline version, go to HTTPS colon slash slash about.draw.io. and this takes you to the about page and then scroll down on the integrations to the very bottom and you'll find draw io desktop and you can download it for windows mac linux and chrome os so you just download the executable install it and you're ready to rock and roll so let's start actually running through what to do let's launch draw io make sure we're on screen here a new diagram and so the very first thing you want to probably do is determine if you're going to be printing this or just designing it to use on your computer if you're printing it choose the appropriate paper size for me i started with the appropriate paper size but i will never print this diagram so i actually went and created a custom size and i made it larger so that i could have it a little bit more wide and it would make everything fit on screen better for me so choose your appropriate paper size From there, you pretty much just drag elements in and start working. By default, when you first start up, you're going to have your general shapes and a few other extra things here. If you're doing a network diagram, you probably want to go down to more shapes and then look at the options you have in here.
So the ones I liked, for example, was under rack. It had the graphics for a lot of the standard rack mount equipment like IBM and Dell and HP. You can preview it by clicking on it. So if you want to click on any of these, you can preview what's inside of it. And then to add it to your toolbar, you just simply check the box and hit apply.
And now those shapes will be available to you over here. So if I go to rack and go to Dell, mouse over it, it gives you a preview. I can say, ooh, a 2U server.
Drag it out there. A 4U server. Drag it out there. And then the other thing you can do is search. So anything in there, you can just say, I want to search for a switch.
Hit enter. And then now you have everything that turned in a result with that key term. So let's find that layer 3 switch that I like to use. Right here.
And we can drag that in. So the very first thing, once your graphics are in there, you'll see that you have these anchor points. This will let you resize if you choose to.
And if you double click on one of those objects, it'll give you the ability to type in some text. So we can say this is a Dell R710. The IP address is 192.168.1.50.
And... click away from it and that's good to go so that's the very first thing to show you how to put text in important thing to know once you have uh put put something in here now you can go to the right side and go to your text and this is where you can change where the position of it is so do you want it on the top or on the left you can change your font type your font structure like do you want it bold underline how big do you want it and what color do you want Now, as you run through random shapes in here, there was some that I ran into that came with a default of like blue text. And so this is where you would change the text color because I wanted everything in black. So you just go in here and change the font color.
Same thing. I have no background color right now. So if I check a background color, it's going to add a background color to it.
So some of the shapes had background color checked and it was a white color. But when I changed my background to gray on my network diagram, It didn't look very good, so that's where I had to fix that at. So once you get done with placing your shapes down, giving them labels, the next thing you're going to have to do for a diagram is connect them. So that's fairly easy to do. You have two options up here.
You have the connection option, and then you have the waypoint option. And they work together. So your connection determines the type of line that you're going to draw. So the single line with an arrow here, grab one of these anchor points, or...
if you're on another shape some some shapes have multiple anchor points just click on it and then drag to where you're going to connect right and then if you change that setting here it changes the type of line so here we have now this double connector line so that's what that first option does let's highlight this delete it Now the second option, the waypoint option, kind of changes how the line is drawn. The default one is the one I like the best. It automatically kind of zigzags as necessary to make a good connection.
If you wanted to have a straight line, for example, then now you can only draw a straight line from A to B. And of course, more options are within that, like curved lines, for example. So let's find this, move it, and here we go, curved lines. So that's the basics of connecting.
Now, once you have a connection, let's change this back to the defaults. You can definitely customize it and tweak it a little bit further. So once you have that drawn, that's not the way you wanted it to be, grab these anchor points and drag them over.
And you'll have to do a lot of this once you start getting a complex diagram to make your lines not overlap or touch something you don't want them to. Also, don't forget, you can go into the style. and there's a lot of options here as well so for example i took the the arrow point off of my line i didn't like the arrow point so that was under the line end option i just put none and then under line start i put none so that way i don't have any shapes on the end it's just a straight line and then you can also of course change your styles the line thickness you can do all that stuff from here With that, you pretty much have the basics on how to get started.
Placing your shapes, connecting them, labeling them, and from there just spend some time with it and build your first basic network diagram. The next thing I'm going to show you that's really cool real quick before we end the basic tutorial video is something I didn't know about until after I already built my diagram. You can easily put your own custom shapes in here.
So let's close out this. You have the scratch pad which is a temporary place to put shapes or you can create your own library which will be saved down here. You can have the items already on your computer or a very easy way to get stuff is just to go to google and we'll search for say adele r710 go to images find something you like now we can just drag this and drop it right into the scratch pad and we'll say either keep it at full size or resize it you should probably just resize it and now we have a shape that we can use inside of our diagram and you can use whatever you want. So if you don't find something that's efficient in these pre-built libraries feel free to create your own with exactly what you want.
Now keep in mind that this is a static image it's not like a vector-based image and all that white space around the outside is going to determine where our lines connect. So if you're going to be building this for a long term not just for playing around you probably want to take this into an image editor and crop it out. That way you get better connections.
So also this is the scratch pad. Let's show you how to do a library. So we'll go to file, new library. We'll call this my equipment and we do the same thing. We'll drag our shape in, resize it.
I want a Dell R210. This guy looks good. Drag them in, resize it. And let's do a...
Dell R510. This guy looks really good. Drag him in, resize it. And Aruba S2500, the switches I'm using.
All right, drag him in. Now we can save this and I'll put it on my desktop for now. And I have a new library and this will be a permanently available library.
So the next time I launch the program. If it's not automatically loaded in here, I just go File, Open Library, and it will import my shapes for use in the project. So like I said, you probably want to crop those out if you're actually going to use them.
But otherwise, that's really cool, and that's something I didn't know up front. So I don't mind the very basic nature of the diagram I have here with the default shapes, but I would have liked it even more if I had used... the actual images. So let's see what else did I do in this diagram that's worth mentioning?
Probably just this piece right here. The only thing special about that, let's clear this off. I just used a basic shape. So we'll grab a couple things real quick. Let's go to rack.
Dell's fine. So you have some objects on screen already and you have some, let's do VM. Almost, that'll work. So these are representing our VMs that I had on that piece of graphic there. And what happened was I took a basic shape like this rectangle with rounded edges and I drew it.
over the top of them, and it covers them. And that was not what I was expecting. So to fix that, you just go to the properties for that object and go to arrange. So you can say to the front or to the back and just move it.
So we'll just say to the back. And that places this graphic behind everything else. And as far as filling, that was under style. I just chose, you can either go to fill and choose the color you want, or you can choose a preset. But of course that...
a little bit too bold and in your face so what I wanted to do with that was lower the opacity down and as you lower the opacity it gives you that nice see-through effect and it's not quite so bold and then of course you just go in here like you did with all the others and label these and I can say this is VM number one VM number two and just kind of carry through with labeling everything as necessary from there and I just connected that with a line that had a dash instead of a solid line to show that it was kind of a Hypothetical connection and not an actual wire connection. So all in all that is going to be the basics for draw IO I don't think there's much more you need to learn once you get in there You'll kind of figure out anything else that is specific to your needs But this will give you all the tools you need for a basic network diagram Now the next video will go over how we do the linking so that when you click on these items You can open up your web pages and your programs So I hope you guys stay tuned for that video. Just want to remind you once again, this is Vicious, and I'll see you next time.