
Show HN: Arcentry – Create Interactive Cloud Diagrams - wolframhempel
https://arcentry.com/
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wolframhempel
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.

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puppetmaster
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!

~~~
wolframhempel
Thanks! We actually build a SCADA demo using it - preview here
[https://youtu.be/ol4SkqeAVfA](https://youtu.be/ol4SkqeAVfA)

~~~
dsl
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.

~~~
wolframhempel
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.

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dmarlow
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.

~~~
stronglikedan
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.

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citilife
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!

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

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

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elAhmo
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.

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dvtrn
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.

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flog
When did we decide architecture diagrams were isometric?

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danellis
At least a decade ago. Maybe two.

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pbadenski
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

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jamestimmins
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.

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steventhedev
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.

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yellowapple
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.

~~~
wolframhempel
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

~~~
yellowapple
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.

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emrakul
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.

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victor106
This looks cool. Wondering what your tech stack looks like? Can you share any
details?

~~~
max_sendfeld
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...](https://medium.com/@WolframHempel_82303/seven-things-ive-
learned-building-a-browser-app-in-webgl-89c7c13c12e8)

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sbr464
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?

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tmitchel2
There have been some serious hours put into that, the scada demo looks great.
Good luck..

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

