Lab map
- Who it’s for
- Lucia owners who want to see their whole lab at a glance.
- What it covers
- What the map draws, how to move around it, what the colours and moving traffic mean, and how to teach it about things it got wrong.
- Why it exists
- A list of devices tells you what exists. A map tells you what is connected to what, what is busy and what just stopped answering.
What it shows
Open Map in the sidebar under Your lab. Lucia joins what it knows from three places into one picture:
- Your network, read from UniFi: the gateway, switches, access points, the VLANs, and the phones, laptops and gadgets connected right now.
- Your Lucia servers and their apps, including the Spark itself.
- Your NAS, if you mounted one, linked to the servers that use it.
The picture is a small city. Your gateway sits at the edge, with a road out to the Internet. Each network or VLAN is a quarter. Servers and devices are buildings in it, and apps stand beside the server that runs them. Roads follow your real cabling: a laptop connects through the access point it uses, and that connects through its switch.
The Internet side is a city too. Each district is a kind of place your devices talk to, such as streaming, gaming, social, cloud and updates. Each destination is a building in it.
If you switch Theme to Universe, the same map becomes a galaxy: your network is a solar system, devices are planets and moons, servers are stations, and the Internet is a galaxy through a wormhole. Nothing about the data changes. Universe needs a browser with 3D graphics turned on, and it is off if your system asks for reduced motion.
UniFi is optional. Without it, the map still draws your Lucia servers and apps under a stand-in gateway, and says "UniFi is not connected" along the bottom. Connect it under Settings → UniFi Network. See Network.
Moving around
| Do this | To do this |
|---|---|
| Drag, scroll and pinch | Turn, zoom and move the view |
| Click a building | Open its details panel |
| Find on the map | Jump to a server, app, device or client by name |
| List | Open a plain list of everything on the map. It works with a keyboard and a screen reader. |
| Layers | Hide link traffic, conversations, apps, clients or storage |
| Esc | Close the panel |
On a narrow screen the toolbar wraps onto a second row, so the buttons stay in reach.
The panel shows the object's health, the route out to the Internet, the traffic it carries by type, the ports it answers on, an app's containers and an Open button that takes you to the right page. Ask the assistant about this hands the object to the assistant with the facts filled in.
Health colours
Buildings glow in their category colour while healthy. Trouble overrides that.
| Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Green, or the category colour | Running |
| Amber | Needs attention |
| Red | Failed |
| Grey | Unknown, not reporting, or an offline client |
The strip along the bottom counts servers, apps running and clients online. When something needs attention, press the count to jump to it.
Traffic
Moving cars on the roads are traffic. Roads widen toward the Internet, where everyone's traffic adds up. Each car's colour is a kind of traffic, such as web, streaming, gaming, DNS or file sharing. The legend lists them. The Traffic switch picks how the speed is averaged: Live, 15m, 1h or 24h. Internet sites picks how many destinations get a building: 40, 100, 1k or all.
What you see depends on what Lucia can measure:
| You have | You get |
|---|---|
| UniFi only | Rates for devices, the WAN and clients. The strip says traffic is from UniFi only. |
| The Observability app | Rates for servers and containers, and conversations. |
| SNMPv3 turned on in UniFi, and its details saved under Settings → UniFi Network → Device traffic (SNMPv3) | Per-port rates on switches and access points |
| NetFlow sent from your gateway to the Observability app | Conversations: who talks to whom, and which Internet sites, with names from AdGuard where Lucia can find them |
Nothing is required. The map gets richer as you add them. See Monitoring.
Sorting things Lucia guesses wrong
Lucia guesses what a device is from its name, its maker and what UniFi says about it. Sometimes it gets it wrong. In the panel you can change:
- a client's Group (Phones, Computers, Smart home, Entertainment, Infrastructure, Unsorted). Choose Automatic to go back to Lucia's guess.
- a building's Category, which sets its colour. Pick one or type your own, such as "Smart plugs".
- an Internet destination's District. Pick one or name a new one.
These choices are saved on your Spark for every owner. A client you moved stays moved, even when its address changes.
Wallboard
Press Wallboard to fill the screen with the map, with no controls. It slowly flies to whatever needs attention, one thing every 12 seconds, and shows a caption. With nothing wrong, it shows the whole map. This is handy on a spare monitor. Press Esc or Exit wallboard to leave.
When something looks wrong
| You see | What to do |
|---|---|
| The map could not be drawn | Press Try again. If it repeats, check that Lucia is running. |
| "UniFi is not connected" | Connect UniFi under Settings → UniFi Network. |
| "UniFi: …" with an error | Open Settings → UniFi Network and check the connection. The message is what UniFi answered. |
| "Traffic is from UniFi only" | Install the Observability app. |
| "No traffic readings yet" | It has just started. Wait a minute, and check the Observability app is running. |
| "Conversations appear once NetFlow arrives" | Send NetFlow from your gateway to the Observability app. |
| Live readings paused | Your browser could not reach Lucia for over 35 seconds. It resumes by itself. |
| A device is on the wrong quarter or group | Open it and set its Group. |
| A server shows Not reporting | It has not contacted Lucia for a couple of minutes. See Servers. |
| Clients are missing | The map shows the ones UniFi saw in the last 30 days, up to 2,000. Offline clients older than that drop off. |
The map redraws its structure about once a minute and its traffic every 10 seconds. A new device can take up to a minute to appear.
Next
- Network for connecting UniFi and AdGuard.
- Monitoring for the Observability app that powers traffic and conversations.
- Spark health for the Spark's own readings, which also feed the map.
- How it is built: Lab map and portal.