Continuum Link
Continuum Link
Continuum Link attaches a saved snapshot from an operational platform to a stratum, as its own read-only tab. Alert state, service ownership and change context sit beside the thing on the diagram they refer to.
It needs an Enterprise plan, edit access to the blueprint, and
continuum_integrations.manage on the organisation or team that owns the
connection. Below Enterprise the engine refuses with "Continuum integrations
are an Enterprise feature."
It never draws
Link writes to a stratum tab and nowhere else. It cannot add, move, recolour or delete anything on a canvas. Diagrams generated from infrastructure come from Continuum Cloud or, for the network in your own estate, from Continuum Local.
Connect a platform
Open Settings → Continuum Link on the organisation or team and choose the system's card. The form for a new integration opens with that system as its Type. It asks for a Name, whatever non-secret fields that connector declares, and one credential. Choosing Connect & verify stores the credential and runs a handshake against the platform in one step.
Jira Cloud and Jira Service Management Operations replace that button with Connect with Atlassian and sign you in instead. Most other connectors take a pasted token or key, GitHub and GitLab included.
Two groups store no credential here. AWS CloudWatch reuses a verified AWS cloud connection: pick that connection and a region, and widen its role with the CloudWatch and Logs actions the form lists. The ten on-premise connectors keep their credential on the Continuum Local agent, and Blueprintr never stores it.
Credentials are encrypted at rest, are never returned to the browser, and are never written into a snapshot. The row afterwards shows a verification state and a bound-tab count.
Link an object to a stratum
Save the blueprint, open a stratum, and choose Continuum Link from its + Add tab menu. Search across every verified connection you can use, review the candidate's identity, then select Link object. The first snapshot is fetched before the binding is saved, so a link that would have failed never lands.
One connection holds one linked object per stratum. Selecting a different object from the same connection replaces that connection's binding. A stratum can carry 20 linked tabs; a twenty-first is refused with "This stratum already has the maximum of 20 integration tabs." Linked tabs do not count toward the 20 tabs you add to a stratum yourself.
In the blueprint editor a linked tab is read-only, because each re-fetch replaces its content. It can still be renamed. To delete it, remove its link.
These tools propose candidates instead of you searching:
| Tool | Where | What it checks |
|---|---|---|
| Suggest Continuum Links | A stratum's tab strip | Blueprintr's suggestion index of every connection, for objects matching the stratum's linked shape, its title, and hostnames, addresses or URLs in its text. Check live asks the connections themselves |
| Suggest Continuum Links | Under a Vellum diagram's bottom bar | The same index, for every shape on the blueprint's saved diagrams, including Continuum Cloud canvas shapes that already have a stratum. Check live asks the connections the index does not fully cover |
| Suggest integrations… | A shape's right-click menu | Up to six connections, for that shape's own identifiers |
| Scan for integrations | Details and files | Titles, tab bodies, file content and diagram shape labels, up to 200 identifiers per scan |
Suggest Continuum Links lists every match it finds and ticks one for you only when its evidence is strong on its own and nothing competes for it. No second object from the same connection can match as closely, no other shape can claim the same object, and the shape's icon must not show a different kind of system. Nothing is ticked from a connection that failed for some shapes, from one whose index is out of date, incomplete or limited to some object types, or when a run finds more matches than it can compare, because a competing match could be missing. It never searches for a name that only describes a role, such as "Database" or "Web server", and it skips container names, text shapes and notes. Every other match is listed unticked with the reason it was held back.
A connection a stratum already links is not suggested for that stratum, because adding a second object from it would replace the first. For the same reason, once you add a match, other matches from that connection for the same stratum can no longer be added from the list.
None of these tools writes anything until you add a match, and a dismissed match is not suggested again. Suggestions read the last saved version of a diagram.
The button under a diagram says how many suggestions there are before you open it, for example "4 Continuum Link Suggestions Found". It counts every match the dialog would list, held-back ones included, and it drops as you add or dismiss them.
The suggestion index
So that Suggest Continuum Links can propose matches without asking your platforms, Blueprintr keeps its own index of what each connection can see.
What it stores
The name and subtitle of each object, under the same audience and detail settings that connection's panels follow, the link to it, and the reference Blueprintr uses to fetch it again. Identifiers such as hostnames, addresses, MAC addresses, serial numbers, asset tags and URLs are stored only as one-way digests, which can be matched but not read back. Alert state, incidents, metrics, panel content and credentials are not stored.
Who sees it
Only people who can already use a connection see matches from its index. The index is never shown as a list of its own; it only produces the suggestions you review.
When it updates
Every hour Monday to Friday between 09:00 and 17:00 UTC+2, and every six hours outside that window. A connection is also queued after you verify it, resume it, change its settings or its credential, and when an administrator chooses Update index. UTC+2 here is a fixed offset and does not follow daylight saving.
Indexed connectors
24 connectors are indexed: PagerDuty, incident.io, Rootly, FireHydrant, xMatters, Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Elastic, Splunk Observability, SolarWinds Observability SaaS, Grafana Alerting, LogicMonitor, Auvik, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring, Pingdom, Better Stack, UptimeRobot, Checkly, Site24x7, ServiceNow CMDB, GitHub and GitLab. Every other connector, including every connector served by the local agent, is checked live instead.
Some object types only
Seven of these connectors index only some of the objects a live check can return, so matches from their index are always held back for review and Check live asks those connections too:
| Connector | Left to the live check |
|---|---|
| Datadog | Monitor names on a Summary connection, and service:, slo: and partial host: name searches |
| GitHub | Public repositories that are not in the token's own repository list |
| GitLab | Projects the token is not a member of, such as public and internal ones |
| incident.io | Incidents, and Catalog types the index skips because they may describe people or on-call schedules |
| New Relic | Entity types outside a fixed list of stable inventory, such as people, secure credentials, issues, incidents, dashboards, work items and containers |
| ServiceNow CMDB | IP-address and network-adapter records |
| xMatters | People and events. The index keeps groups only |
Limits
An index holds at most 50,000 objects for one connection. A connection with more is marked incomplete.
Incomplete indexes
An index is also marked incomplete when the platform cannot be listed to the end, and when objects were left out because the reference Blueprintr keeps for them includes a URL with credentials or a secret parameter such as a token, for example a monitored web address. Such objects are skipped, never stored with the secret removed. An incomplete index keeps its matches held back until a later update lists the platform in full.
Empty listings
If a connection whose index has objects lists nothing, Blueprintr keeps the previous index and marks it incomplete. Only a second empty listing in a row replaces it, and that update waits for the normal schedule even when an administrator chooses Update index or verifies the connection sooner.
Held back
Matches from an index that is incomplete, or more than 12 hours old, are listed with that reason and never ticked for you, because a closer match may be missing from it. Check live asks those connections directly.
What it can and cannot find
The index reaches objects beyond the page limits a live search works within, so it can find matches a live check misses. A live check searches text the index does not hold, so it can find matches the index misses. Neither is a subset of the other.
When an index is deleted
Indexing switched off for that connection, the connection suspended, its token removed or replaced, its settings saved, a failed verification, a credential the platform rejects, the connection deleted, the plan lapsing (within about an hour), and seven days without a successful update. Database backups keep deleted rows for their retention period.
The index never writes to a blueprint. Adding a match still fetches a live snapshot through the same path as any other link.
Refreshing is manual
Opening a tab shows its saved snapshot and contacts nothing. Nothing polls a platform to update a tab, and no tab is refreshed on a schedule. The one thing Blueprintr runs on a schedule is the suggestion index, which proposes links and never changes a tab.
Each linked row has two icon buttons with no visible text. The circular-arrows icon re-fetches, and its tooltip reads "Re-fetch this integration's data". The broken-link icon removes the tab, with the tooltip "Remove this integration tab", and asks you to confirm.
A banner above every saved tab states which of these applies:
| Banner | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Saved snapshot | The last fetch succeeded and is still considered fresh |
| Snapshot needs a refresh | Older than the connector's freshness window |
| Incomplete snapshot | Retrieval was limited or some sections could not be read; check section coverage before interpreting counts |
| Last refresh failed | The previous snapshot is still shown, unchanged |
| Refresh paused | The connection is suspended |
Ten connectors declare a freshness window: PagerDuty, incident.io, Rootly, Datadog, LogicMonitor, Auvik, Jira Cloud, Jira Service Management Operations, ServiceNow and GitHub. Most set five minutes. Jira Cloud work items and GitHub set fifteen, Jira Service Management on-call coverage sets two, and ServiceNow sets one day.
The other eighteen connectors never report a snapshot as needing a refresh. A months-old Grafana tab still reads "Saved snapshot". Check the fetch time on the tab rather than trusting the banner.
The banner is a reminder to refresh, never automatic polling.
The GitHub connector distinguishes an empty result from incomplete or unavailable reads. A repository metadata/identity failure preserves its previous snapshot; an enabled section failure is marked in a newly saved partial snapshot. Coverage and failure handling vary by connector; consult its guide before interpreting absence.
Who can read a saved panel
This depends on the connector, so check it before linking.
| Connector | Default audience for a new connection |
|---|---|
| Datadog, LogicMonitor, Auvik, Rootly, ServiceNow, GitHub, NetBox | Blueprint editors only |
| Infoblox, Veeam Backup & Replication | Blueprint editors only, with no setting to widen it |
| Every other connector | Everyone who can read the stratum |
A connector in the last row has no audience setting, so its panel reaches every reader of the blueprint. On a public blueprint that includes anonymous readers, embeds and exports. The seven connectors in the first row offer a reader-visible option labelled All Blueprint readers; on four of them the full label adds "approved metadata".
A Datadog or LogicMonitor connection created before those settings existed keeps its historical behaviour, which is reader-visible and detailed, until an administrator changes it in Configure. Its form shows those historical values, so saving without changing them keeps them. Check old connections rather than assuming the newer defaults apply. Rootly, Auvik, ServiceNow and GitHub read a missing audience setting as Blueprint editors only for future fetches, and a missing detail setting as summary on Auvik and GitHub and as detailed on ServiceNow. See the GitHub guide.
An audience change applies to later fetches. It does not rewrite snapshots already saved, and it cannot recall versions, templates, exports, embeds or AI answers that already carry the data. Unlinking a tab and revoking a credential cannot recall them either.
Managing a connection
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Configure | Edits the connection's non-secret settings, including audience and detail |
| Verify | Re-runs the handshake, including optional capabilities |
| Suspend / Resume | Stops and restarts search and refresh. Saved snapshots stay readable |
| Rotate token or Replace credentials | Reveals a field, then Verify & replace swaps the credential only if the new one verifies |
| Remove token… | Clears the stored credential and suspends the connection |
| Update index | Asks for a fresh pass of the suggestion index now, unless one ran in the last few minutes |
| Stop indexing… / Start indexing | Leaves this connection out of the suggestion index, or puts it back. Stopping deletes its index, and its matches are then checked live |
Deleting a connection is refused while tabs are still bound to it: "This integration has N stratum tab(s) bound to it. Remove those first."
If the plan lapses, the section stays open in a cleanup-only mode. You can suspend, inspect, unlink and disconnect. Adding or refreshing data needs Enterprise again, and the suggestion indexes for that owner's connections are deleted within about an hour.
Which platforms
39 connectors are registered. 29 work directly, and 10 more need Continuum Local, the agent that also sweeps and draws your on-premise network, for systems Blueprintr cannot reach.
The connector reference lists all of them with what each one asks for and shows. These have a guide of their own: