After connecting an application and fetching its configuration, you are now ready to explore and search these configuration elements, see how they relate to each other, and answer questions about the impact a certain change may have on other areas of your configuration—e.g., where a certain field is being used, which security workflow is using a certain policy template, etc.
Configuration Elements
📘 Elements are the basic building block of information in the Tulip ecosystem; they represent everything Tulip knows about the configuration of the security applications it manages.
When Tulip runs a fetch operation, it communicates with the upstream security applications via their APIs and translates the information it receives into Tulip configuration elements.
Tulip configuration elements may represent any configuration aspect of the application, e.g. security policy, custom field, device management profile, access rule, workflow, etc.
When Tulip detects a configuration element that relates to another one, it generates a ‘Tulip reference’, representing this information. This detection allows users to identify dependencies throughout their security configuration. We commonly refer to this use case as ‘Impact Analysis’.
In some cases, Tulip can detect references across more than one security application, e.g., a workflow connecting an Okta group and a Microsoft Entra ID policy. This detection allows users to generate cross-application impact analysis insights.
A certain configuration element may be linked to a ‘static file’ containing additional textual or binary information related to that element, e.g. code, policy template, image (icon), etc.
Textual Representation of Elements - The NaCl Language
Tulip configuration elements also have a textual representation that is based on Tulip's NaCl language.
Fetched configuration elements are translated to the NaCl format and stored in text files containing a representation of the configuration, relations to other elements, and links to static files.
Maintaining the application configuration in textual files allows Tulip users to:
View and edit their configuration via text editors.
Leverage Git in order to manage and collaborate on configuration versions.
Exploring and Searching your Applicaiton Configuration
To begin exploring an application's configuration in Tulip, navigate to the Applications screen from the left-hand menu. You'll see a list of all connected applications, each displayed in its own card. To dive into the configuration data of a specific application, click the magnifying glass icon labeled “Explore application data” next to the application you’re interested in.
This will take you to the application connection explore screen, where you can view and search the configuration, as well as identify dependencies by navigating references between configuration elements.
Once you enter the Explore screen for a specific application connection (in this case, Okta), you are presented with a detailed, navigable view of its configuration elements.
Left Sidebar – Configuration Navigation Tree
The screens' left panel presents a hierarchical tree of configuration elements, grouped by type (e.g., Access Policy, Application, Automation, Group). In the screenshot example, the selected element is an automation rule named “disable users after period”
At the top of the panel, you’ll find a search bar that enables flexible navigation across your configuration:
You can search by element names (and their corresponding file names), or even within the internal content of elements—such as strings inside templates, scripts, or rules.
When you enter a search term, additional search tools appear, including buttons to enable regular expression (regex) searches and whole word matching for more precise querying.
You can learn more about regular expressions at this URL.
At this time multi-line regex based search (\n) is not supported.
Main Panel – Element Details
The main panel on the right displays detailed information about the selected configuration element. This includes:
Element properties such as Name, Status, and Tulip Element ID, etc..
A Dependencies section, which visualizes relationships to and from other elements, helping you understand what this element relies on and what relies on it.
A convenient external link button in the top-right corner (e.g., “Open in Okta” in the example above), allowing you to quickly jump to the corresponding resource in the connected application.
Missing an Element?
In case an element you are looking for does not exist in search, it might be because your app connection configuration is excluding it.
Each application connection can be configured to control the scope of the configuration data that is being fetched into Tulip. To learn more about app connection configurations and how to include or exclude types, check out this guide.
In case your application connection is configured properly and you still miss an element in search, let us know.