Model your first landscape

This guide walks you through creating your first IT landscape model in Dependra — from creating a product suite to defining individual components.

Prerequisites

• A Dependra account with Editor or higher role
• Access to your tenant dashboard at dependra.io

Step 1: Create a Product Suite

A Product Suite groups related applications under shared ownership.

1. Navigate to the Dashboard and open the sidebar.
2. Select Product Suites from the navigation.
3. Click New Product Suite.
4. Fill in the details:
   • Name — A clear, recognizable name (e.g., “Customer Platform”)
   • Technical name — A stable identifier for API use (e.g., customer-platform)
   • Description — What this suite encompasses
   • Responsible contact — Who owns this suite

Step 2: Add Applications

Applications are the individual systems within a suite.

1. Open your Product Suite.
2. Click Add Application.
3. Fill in the application details:
   • Name — The system name (e.g., “Order Service”)
   • Description — A one-line summary of what this application does
   • Lifecycle state — Where is this application in its lifecycle? (e.g., active, planned, retiring)
   • Criticality tier — How critical is this system? (e.g., Tier 1 for business-critical)
   • Owner team — Which team is responsible
   • Tags — Cross-cutting labels like public-facing, pci-scope, legacy
4. Optionally add RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) values.
5. Use the Markdown editor to add richer documentation.

Repeat this for each major system in the suite.

Step 3: Define Components

Components are the deployable units within an application.

1. Open an Application.
2. Click Add Component.
3. Select the component kind (WebAPI, WebApp, Queue, Worker, etc.).
4. Fill in the component details:
   • Name — What this component is (e.g., “Orders API”)
   • Technical name — Stable identifier (e.g., orders-api)
   • Description — What this component does
   • Runtime — How it’s deployed (containers, VMs, serverless, etc.)
5. Add kind-specific metadata (e.g., URL and protocols for a Web API).
6. Optionally tag with Hosting Area and Hosting Zone to show where it runs.

Step 4: Set up Hosting Topology (optional)

If you want to track where your components run:

1. Navigate to Hosting Providers in the sidebar.
2. Create a provider (e.g., “AWS”).
3. Add hosting areas (e.g., “Production Account”).
4. Add hosting zones (e.g., “eu-west-1”).
5. Go back to your components and tag them with the appropriate area and zone.

What’s next?

Now that you have a landscape model, the next step is to add dependencies between your applications and components.