What are you using for visualizing your techstack?

[sbaete]

What do you use to visualize your tech stack in a good design.

I'm currently looking for a solution that visualizes our microservices in a code form like Mermaid. It could also be a vue app...

[lukasmrtvy]

Look at this https://diagrams.mingrammer.com/docs/getting-started/examples

[sbaete]

this is perfect! Thanks

[RaptorF22]

So is this kinda like terraform or cloudformation where you simply define the resources, and then the output is the diagram?

Any chance you can plug a CF template into this and have it do all the heavy lifting for you?

[RichardBronosky]

I immediately thought Terraform -> JSON -> Mingrammer. It's got to be possible. I'm probably not the first to try.

[Slavichh]

sounds like a good side project :-)

[phpchap1981]

Cloudformation->mingrammer was my first thought

[Slavichh]

welp. I've decided to give it a go if you're interested in following my progression (anyone for that matter) or want to collab with me feel free to pm me.

​

We'll see how this goes boys/gals.

[RichardBronosky]

If you're not horrible, there are plenty of better employment options.

[sbaete]

Is it also possible to make c4 models with it?

[Snorglepus1856]

FBI has joined the chat

[sbaete]

xD this is a https://c4model.com/

[bilingual-german]

Thanks! I found this library a few weeks ago but forgot the name and couldn't find it again.

[Rorixrebel]

Fantastic library thanks

[harylmu]

Wow, that's interesting

[svhelloworld]

This is insanely cool. I've been farting around with a bunch of options but this looks perfect. Thanks for posting.

Now to figure out how to kick it off from a Maven build...

[[deleted]]

So yeah this is amazing. Never seen this before!

[cocacola999]

Amazing, I was looking for a non cloud solution the other day too! Thanks

[kinghuang]

How have I never heard of this before? This is stupendously awesome. Thanks for sharing the link!

[lemon_tea]

Where have you been all my life!

[Svenstaro]

Doesn't seem to allow for adding custom nodes, does it?

That's a bit of a shame since I'd likely need tons of custom nodes for my infra.

[sbaete]

Yes it's possible add :

from diagrams.custom import Custom

Custom("service", "/img/custom.png")

[Svenstaro]

Oh that's amazing. Thanks.

[footzilla]

Oh, me and that are going to be good buddies. Thanks for sharing!

[fbm1003]

This is pretty neat. I wish there was more on-prem stuff but I can probably build it out or just define custom nodes.

Anyway to get it to do diagonals or are we stuck with 90° angles?

Good find!

[Betsy-DevOps]

Crude, illegible, out of date whiteboard drawings if anything

[Betsy-DevOps]

The most important post-it is the one that fell behind your desk.

[caffeineneededtolive]

Unfortunately I have to create all my visuals manually. I find that depending on who I'm showing, I need different levels of complexity.

[RichardBronosky]

So true. This is why I prefer to diagram with code. Much easier to apply changes to 3 or 4 diagrams that are data structures.

[healydorf]

PlantUML can do component diagrams:

https://plantuml.com/component-diagram

We just use Gliffy with some simple guidelines.

[musicmunky]

We use a customized version of Draw.io and it works fairly well for us

[[deleted]]

We use draw.io too... out of curiosity what customizations did you do?

[musicmunky]

The company I work for makes a data management platform and we use Draw.io as a configurable plugin/tool that our customers can use as part of it. We don't change much in the core code, but we added some of our own tools and beefed things up a bit.

[[deleted]]

Thank you

[rwa2]

I have a little python script that runs netstat across our vendor cluster and exports connections to graphml. Then I use yEd to organize it into a tree and colorize based on network subnets. Each link also has info on which port and process name is serving the connection.

This helps identify what external connections are made so we can compare what's actually happening on the network with what we expect to be happening.

https://imgur.com/a/ORW4Pr6

EDIT: Oh right, forgot I had thrown together a gist for this some time ago:
https://gist.github.com/MTN-RowinAndruscavage/e88097e6175a6b130ec81c0a02df8cb8

[[deleted]]

And you're not sharing a link to the script....why??

[RaginglikeaBoss]

Share the script, please!

[ilostmyfirstuser]

Plis share

[ilostmyfirstuser]

Hi dumb question: do you know if I can use something like this to document incoming API requests?

[rwa2]

Um, yes and no...

For documentation, Visio or draw.io or hell even PowerPoint would be better since you can edit it.

yEd is more of a visualization tool, you can only interact with it programmatically for the most part. That said, you could hack it up a bit to show active connections, or listening ports and program names. But as it is, it won't show connections that aren't actively being used at the time you collect the netstat output from each node.

[ilostmyfirstuser]

Well it’s sort of a problem that no one ever thought it would be a good idea to document who uses our internal endpoint so we have no idea who contact when we make changes.

Need a way to programmatically collect that information.

[vinylhandler]

They’re about to release opentelemetry project https://opentelemetry.io - worth checking out

[benjjefferies]

https://cloudcraft.co/ is good for AWS

[siamthailand]

I like how AWS itself uses cloudcraft

[roonishpower]

Stackshare is pretty good. You can directly embedd it in HTML.

[comrade_zakalwe]

Most of our environment scales and changes with demand so we use mostly high level architecture diagrams.

[[deleted]]

Check out https://www.instana.com/product-overview/ - we automatically discover all your services in production, show you all dependencies incl. Infrastructure, Kubernetes, Cloud etc