Your First 30 Days with Canopy
So your Canopy is up and running, and now you're staring at an empty inventory wondering where to actually start. This guide is for you.
'Your First 30 Days' is a sequenced, opinionated walkthrough of the first concrete EA initiative most organisations run on Canopy: getting an application inventory under control and using it to answer real portfolio questions.
It deliberately ignores the more advanced modules (Risk Register, Compliance, PPM, TurboLens AI); those become useful once your inventory is alive, not before.
Who this guide is for
- Enterprise Architects starting a fresh EA practice or migrating from spreadsheets, Confluence, or another tool.
- Solution Architects and Application Owners asked to "fill in the EA tool" without much context.
- Admins preparing the platform for a wider rollout.
You'll need the admin role (or at least admin.metamodel and inventory.edit) to follow every step. Read-only roles can still benefit - they just won't be able to make the metamodel changes in page 5.
The crawl → walk → run arc
Don't try to model the entire enterprise in week one. The teams that succeed with EA tooling follow a phased path:
- Crawl: One narrow scope (a business domain, a country, a platform). One card type (Applications). Five fields per card. Get to "good enough" data on 50–200 cards.
- Walk: Add Business Capabilities from the bundled catalogue. Map applications to capabilities. Run your first portfolio analysis. Show it to a stakeholder.
- Run: Expand to processes, interfaces, data objects. Add more custom fields. Open the more advanced modules.
This guide covers crawl and the beginning of walk. By the end of it, you'll have a working application portfolio with a TIME disposition (Tolerate / Invest / Migrate / Eliminate) and a Portfolio Report you can put in front of a CIO.
What's in this guide
| # | Page | What you'll do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Plan your rollout | Scope the initiative, pick stakeholders, set a realistic data-quality target |
| 2 | Start with your application inventory | Populate Applications via import, ServiceNow, or manual entry |
| 3 | Leverage reference catalogues | Skip months of hand-modelling by importing capabilities and processes |
| 4 | Customise the metamodel - lightly | Add one custom field (TIME) the right way |
| 5 | Your first analysis: Application Harmonisation | Map apps to capabilities, run the Portfolio Report and Capability Heatmap |
Read all five pages in order before opening Canopy. The plan in your head is more valuable than the first 50 cards in the inventory.
Prerequisites
- A running Canopy instance.
- An admin account (the first user to register becomes admin automatically: use an enterprise login and/or choose your expert wisely).
- Optional but recommended for first-time users: start the stack with
SEED_DEMO=trueonce to see what a populated inventory looks like (the NexaTech Industries fictional company). You can then reset withRESET_DB=trueand start clean on your real data. - A rough idea of the business domain you want to model first. "All of IT" is not a domain.
What you'll skip - for now
These are powerful modules, but they assume you already have a populated inventory. Don't open them yet:
- Risk Register and Compliance scanning - useful once you have applications and capabilities to attach risks to.
- PPM (Project Portfolio Management) - useful once you have a project pipeline worth tracking.
- TurboLens AI (vendor analysis, duplicate detection, Architect wizard) - useful once you have enough cards for the AI to find patterns in.
You'll find a short "what's next" pointer to each of them on the final page of this guide.
Ready? Head to Plan your rollout.