[alexkwood]

Re 1: We have stacks of excel workbooks and worksheets documenting all assets, will you be providing templates where we can plug in these values and it gets imported Re 2: Same we consolidate all daily usage reports available from the cloud vendors Re 3: Would your tool consolidate data as a CMDB, then it would be good Re 4: Suggestions is fine, access to directly modify/delete NO

[rrohn]

Interesting. Re 1: Wasnt planning on doing this, as creating diagrams thru tags will ensure that you have updates in real time. If you had access to such a tool, would you gives access to tag manager? Re 3: Not in first MVP, but will be doing it. Re 4: Fair. I suppose suggestions will be useful by themselves.

[alexkwood]

we have dedicated finance staff who compile all billing reconciliation end-to-end, any tags we need just gets added as a lookup to their datamart controlled by a unique asset tag. Very hard to justify giving access to compliance staff who always reject such requests

[rrohn]

Fair to assume this is a bank or a financial institution? IMHO working with excel sheets will not justify the usage of the tool.

You get the idea of what I am trying to build, if you were to do this for your org, how would you solve the problem? What will you do?

[alexkwood]

we have a solution based on plantuml deployment/networking api's where we generate static 2D diagrams as .svg from our datasets. We also have a basic 3d representation using python scripting and blender which exports to .gltf 3dmodels which we import into godot game engine web edition.

[rrohn]

Wow. Thats some elaborate solutioning. I think the documentaion and cost attribution is pretty sorted at your shop. Does this solution help you save some costs at any point or the primary goal is only documentation?

[alexkwood]

Managing production IT infrastructure is akin to overseeing a construction project. It’s crucial to refrain from implementing any tasks without comprehensive diagrams. Maintaining cost control is of utmost importance for the longevity of a business. With GitHub Copilot, the automation of complex integration tools becomes significantly more manageable.

We are in the process of developing a freeware Excel plugin for the PlantUML component. This plugin will enable users to generate diagrams directly from spreadsheet templates. If you’re interested in trying out the beta version of this plugin, please send me an email and I’ll be happy to share it with you.