Show HN: Arcentry – Create Interactive Cloud Diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Arcentry – Create Interactive Cloud Diagrams

arcentry.com

75 pointswolframhempel34 comments

Founder here: We're currently trying to evaluate if it makes sense for Arcentry to go beyond being a diagramming tool to becoming a cloud monitoring dashboard with charts, scale groups etc. directly embedded into the visualisation. Would love to get your thoughts on it.

I think there's definitely scope for a 'Weathermap' style monitoring overlay, however I'm not (personally) digging graphs overlaid isometrically with the infra. Perhaps a 2D overlay of charts? (Just my opinion, may not look that clean in reality)

My two cents, do one thing well. Monitoring is as hard to tackle as good, and meaningful dashboarding.

I would focus on working on integrating with third party monitoring keeping the core in the dashboards. Coming from and industrial control & instrumentation background I like dashboards that show all elements in a system and how they interact with each other (Look for SCADA dashboards of a turbine, for example)

looks great btw, kudos and good luck!

Thanks! We actually build a SCADA demo using it - preview here https://youtu.be/ol4SkqeAVfA

Woah!! That looks great!

I think you should share this prominently on your website, showing how you can do more than just cloud.

There are a lot of infrastructure segments that could benefit from your product even beyond the industrial setting. Traffic? Production lines? More!

You need to add a lot more generic icons that are not tied to specific cloud providers. I found it very difficult to map out a system I built in a datacenter.

Sure - what extactly would you be looking for? There's also a section in Arcentry labelled "Generic & Customizable Components" which has 56 generic servers, databases, PCs and basics like cubes and triangles.

I think you need to charge a lot more than $10/mo for unlimited usage, especially for a monitoring tool. Edit: Just saw you have an enterprise tier at $12/user/mo.

I say go for it, or maybe just add a generic event hook/workflow system that has basic Boolean logic? See json-logic etc.

I like the updating metrics, the mixer animation in the scada demo was especially cute.

This is very cool. I would love to use this in a data science / data engineering context.

At my firm, we build complex data pipelines (data goes from S3 -> Spark -> Redshift -> between Redshift tables etc.). Our data sources comes from FTPs, vendor databases, vendor flatfiles, etc. Further, business analysts build Tableau dashboards on materialized views or temp tables. Data scientists use raw data tables and create aggregated tables or forecasts.

It would be tremendously helpful to have a way to map out programmatically where the data is going and coming from (which vendor FTP did this table come from, where is this view coming from, etc.)

We have utility functions/libraries (use Scala & R) that we always use for reading data, writing tables, etc. It would be amazing to just plug in API calls into those utility functions to auto-generate maps which we could later edit/document. The new trends of data catalogues (see https://alation.com/ or http://data.world)is really useful - but it requires a lot of manual documentation (non-programmatic) that data scientists inevitably don't do.

What I've always wanted is an interactive diagramming tool that shows more detail as you zoom in; zoomed out, it would show high level details. This would allow for a single diagram, potentially, to convey nearly everything about your system.

I remember doing this with some mind mapping tools that supported images and text, but it's been a while and I cannot remember which ones specifically. Kinda hacky and possibly crude compared to modern diagramming tools, but it was suitable for my purposes at the time.

You may want to check into those. I'm sure there are some newer versions that are more polished than those that I've used previously.

Most model based UML tools provide this feature. You can create diagrams that show the different component in detail as a white box. In another diagram where you show the interaction between the components, you can reuse your white box diagrams as a single blackbox component object. Clicking on the blackbox element takes you to the white box view of the element.

I second this and haven't found anything that really suits it. I would imagine something like a map view where zooming out would give you very few details of the landscape but zooming in would show you the details, especially those of interfaces.

Kudos for an amazing design. I think it's limited to somewhat small architecture, and haven't had the opportunity to try to plug my logs in yet, but I'm excited to try!

Congrats on an useful service, that I will pay for.

Couldn't help noting the similarity between your end product and Jurassic Park's layout :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng (around the 15th second).

So, this looks really interesting, but I don't really want to create an account just to try it out :/

Agree. I would love even a simple playground to try it in a limited fashion.

This is valid product feedback for a Show HN and shouldn't be downvoted.

I did create an account eventually, but I was expecting to be able to test it on the page as well. In the 'Plan section', I was clicking on the icons with the MongoDB element and thought it would update.

This looks really interesting, I have a question:

My team is currently using cloudcraft which has the ability to import infrastructure already built and generate diagrams based upon, and even export terraform files to build infrastructure from collaborative diagrams made. This second one is a big deal for us.

Is this something on your roadmap or would you consider it? Comparatively, your pricing model is already more attractive for the value offered (compared to the $50/mo for 5 users we pay currently-and we're not a large team so cost savings are always welcome in my shop), but being able to rapidly export terraform files and prototype infrastructure insanely quickly is something I don't think we're yet ready to sacrifice.

When did we decide architecture diagrams were isometric?

At least a decade ago. Maybe two.

It looks really cool. I dreamed of software like this, which can visually show high level of the complete architecture. And if I could connect it to these via plugins, wow even better.

My experience so far: - can't really bring our architecture in - components mostly seem very vendor specific and focus on major players. We use Digital Ocean and it wasn't there, I looked for generic "Cloud Machine" it wasn't there either. Same for logging, etc. and the list goes on. - it could be useful to share some views on architecture in presentation mode with vendors and customers, there doesn't seem to be anything like that I could find

Wow this looks amazing and I've wanted something exactly like this for a while. If there are docs of some kind that would be super helpful.

Also I think the hover description for the "Ask a question or contact support" button is broken.

Looks like the keyboard shortcuts don't map to Mac well. Command-A selects all the text, but Control-A works as expected. Worse, when I hit backspace to delete everything, it did a browser back. The illusion of an app was lost instantly.

It might be a good idea to add a "component vendors" setting to quickly filter out GCP stuff or AWS stuff if you don't use that specific cloud.

Otherwise looks very interesting, and somewhat useful, although I doubt I'd ever use it for the monitoring stuff. That makes for a neat demo, but I'd use this for documentation, not monitoring.

My approximately-two cents:

- A bit annoying that the scrollwheel doesn't do anything; the natural thing would be for it to zoom in/out.

- There doesn't seem to be a way to resize an area by dragging an edge; you have to drag each corner individually, which seems to be error-prone.

- The default zoom level makes it hard to snap things to major gridlines, which exacerbates the issue with the lack of edge-dragging above (since it's harder than it should be to get the corners to line up horizontally or vertically).

If these issues could be fixed, I can see myself using this for day-to-day stuff.

Thanks,this is interesting. The mousewheel should let you zoom and pan when pressed - but it sounds like that might not be the case. Could you share the kind of mouse you're using? Some, eg apples magic mouse provide non-standard events

It's an Elecom EX-G, so a pretty run-of-the-mill scrollwheel. The vast majority of other websites work fine with it.

This is on Firefox Developer Edition 64 on Linux, if that helps.

EDIT: also, the middle-click-to-pan works fine. It's just zooming that seems to be non-operational.

Looks really cool, love that you're using vue too Two small things - Seems like you're still using the development version of Vue? - The meta tag's content is "Create beaufitul architecture diagrams for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Open Source" with beautiful misspelled, so when I copy the website url lets say to share slack it looks a little off.

This looks cool. Wondering what your tech stack looks like? Can you share any details?

It's ThreeJS and Vue for the frontend and AWS Lambda/Postgres on the backend. I've wrote an article about an earlier version of Arcentry talking about its challenges and solutions here: https://medium.com/@WolframHempel_82303/seven-things-ive-lea...

In addition to using diagrams to help understanding complex relationships, I’m curious if a platform built similarly to Age of Empires or the older Sim City games could help also?

Did anything projects like that ever exist?

There have been some serious hours put into that, the scada demo looks great. Good luck..

can I import a cloudformation template and get an auto-generated visualization?

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