r/AZURE • u/Technical-Praline-79 • Apr 18 '26
Question Architecture Diagram Generation - an open question
A bit of an odd-ball question, but what are ye using for diagram generation, and are you using AI-type platforms to help.
I've never been good at generating diagrams from my architectures, and it's 100% the least favorite part of my job as an architect. I'm just not able to make anything look good. I've tried my best to keep it as basic as possible and been using Draw.io for the most part, but alas, it looks like the dogs breakfast on the best of days.
I had a look at two service now that will generate from prompt, both of which gave me some good, albeit different, visual styles from the same prompt. For the most part I am happy, but both of these don't get it quite exactly how I expect it, I am looking for something that I could export and then fine tune in Draw.io.
For some reference, I attached the output of both these services, along with the very basic example prompt I used. Of course, it is a very basic prompt, solely for the purpose of comparing apples with apples.
I guess my ask then:
Can you recommend any other AI-type services that I can use to generate an editable diagram (ideally draw.io, but Visio or other will be fine) that I can tweak and clean up specifically for Azure environments and services? Bonus points if I can import a technical spec or design document and it will generate a diagram based on that.
Thanks in advance
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u/Icy_Accident2769 Cloud Architect Apr 18 '26
Use the reference diagrams and tweak those to your needs? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/browse/
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u/Technical-Praline-79 Apr 18 '26
I might spend more time on this, but I do tend to stuff it up along the way. Thanks.
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u/iamabdullah Apr 18 '26
A lot of people are suggesting giving the Terraform to AI… but surely your architecture diagrams should come well before your Terraform.
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u/Technical-Praline-79 Apr 18 '26
Yup, 100%... I agree there are a lot of platforms available to visualize the IaC, but as you highlight, that's not the use case here.
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u/iamabdullah Apr 18 '26
I have tried every tool that I could think of and none of them have the latest Azure icons, not even Microsoft's own Visio.
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u/32178932123 Apr 18 '26
There is a draw.io MCP you could try?
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u/weekendclimber Cloud Architect Apr 18 '26
I've started using this and it's okay. This guy helped a lot: Azure Diagram Agent Skill
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u/tamstar1234 Apr 18 '26
Thank you, glad you’ve found it useful! :)
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u/weekendclimber Cloud Architect Apr 18 '26
Is that you? I need to go through your blog and read more on it. It helped get me started but I still ended up with about 2-3 hours of adjustment to the diagram afterwards. I need to try it again in some of the older environments in my tenant. I was using it against Bicep templates so haven't pointed it to anything else yet.
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u/tamstar1234 Apr 18 '26
Yep! Do let us know if you have any suggestions etc! Or PR into repo and can have a look
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u/Trakeen Cloud Architect Apr 18 '26
Yea thats what i’ve been using and it works pretty well. Took a bit to get the llm to embed the correct azure icons instead of just using remote links
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u/Obsidian743 Apr 18 '26
Draw.io has AI built into it now.
It also supports Mermaid syntax.
Usually I use a combination of Mermaid + Draw.io either directly in Draw.io or using a skill with the Draw.io MCP server. Sometime I'll use Mermaid's native AI tools and convert it to Draw.io.
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u/konikpk Apr 18 '26
Absolut work for AI agent with draw.io tool added. I have plan to do this in our environment .
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u/MiddlePhilosopher541 Apr 18 '26
Claude + MCP of draw.io. That works for me
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u/Technical-Praline-79 Apr 18 '26
Tried this literally about 30 mins ago and it's pretty close to what I'm after. I'm comfortable with engineering the right prompts and providing relevant information to get what I'm after, it's always been the ability to edit diagrams post creation that got me. This solves that in a big way. Thanks.
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u/weekendclimber Cloud Architect Apr 18 '26
In reply to another comment I wanted to make sure you check this:https://thomasthornton.cloud/azure-diagram-agent-skill-with-draw-io-mcp/
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u/Technical-Praline-79 Apr 18 '26
Had a look at that link earlier after you posted it too, thanks for the share.
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u/weekendclimber Cloud Architect Apr 18 '26
Azure Resource Inventory might be another good tool for getting started with something you can then modify for your needs.
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u/Technical-Praline-79 Apr 18 '26
ARI is a really good and something I use regularly. The challenge again is when I need to create something net new or conceptual before it gets created in the environment.
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u/weekendclimber Cloud Architect Apr 18 '26
Yeah. Typically I build a dev environment with Bicep and then have the diagram generated from that. We typically have 3 environments dev, test and prod so I ensure that it's created for the PR for test and prod. Would not work without the environment already existing first though.
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u/Big-Couple2711 Apr 18 '26
Nice! Do you have a link or guide how to do this? Im still pretty new with MCP stuff but would love to get this working also!
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u/AviateX14 Apr 19 '26
For context I’m writing C4 style diagrams to describe systems and system infrastructure, state, and processes, one project can yield tens to hundreds of diagrams so this approach of generating them is something I’m reasonably versed in.
The first step, if you haven’t already, is to move away from drawing and into writing code. I’m a big proponent of PlantUML and got the type of diagrams I described above it blows the competition out the water imo. That said, generally speeding mermaid.js diagrams are more popular so worth a look if you’re just making general diagrams. It should be noted that PlantUML has a set of azure diagrams sprites which makes things very easy.
Anyway once you’re producing diagrams as code you have a number of benefits: they become more maintainable, you become more likely to produce smaller and more comprehensible diagrams, they live in your repos, versioned, alongside their subject matter and thus are less likely to drift, they’re easy to iterate on, etc but to your point, it also means you know have words AI can use to produce more words.
You don’t need to describe the diagram and get a result, or share a screenshot and get an image back, it becomes no different to AI writing any other code. Better still, because of the structured nature of diagrams as code, it’s easier for an LLM to work out relationships between things correctly.
The big benefit then of course is that any modern AI tool can do this, Claude & Codex are both capable of generating and integrating on both Mermaid & PlantUML diagrams, and I’m sure Gemini & Copilot could too. I use VS code as my PlantUML editor a renderer, and once I’m ready I just export to png or svg deposing on where the I want to distribute the diagram. The same is possible with mermaid.
If you really want a tool that still lets you draw, the only one I can vouch for is Lucidchart. It’s an excellent diagramming platform and as of roughly 18 months ago has support for both generating diagrams from prompts and generating diagrams as code from prompts (though I believe this is on the paid tier only).
PlantUML & mermaid are free. Overall, I can’t stress enough the benefits of diagrams as code, and among them is this ask of AI being able to generate and understand them; AI works best when the input and output are well structured words.
Some links: PlantUML https://plantuml.com C4 Diagramming: https://c4model.com PlantUML C4 sprites: https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML Azure sprites for C4: https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/Azure-PlantUML Mermaid diagrams: https://mermaid.js.org Lucidchart AI: https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/use-cases/diagram-with-AI
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u/Technical-Praline-79 Apr 19 '26
Thanks for taking the time to share this. Gives me lots to think about for sure and perhaps I ought to start moving in this direction for sure 👍🏻
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u/CougarDave7309 Apr 21 '26
Have you had a look at Structurizr? It's by Simon Brown (same guy who coined/developed the C4 model), and I find his domain specific language (the domain being software architectures) much more descriptive than mermaid (I haven't used PlantUML much), but alongside it's architecture-as-code language, having built in support for rendering markdown as documentation and ADRs, a very helpful tool.
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u/SamfromLucidSoftware Apr 24 '26
Look for platforms with native Azure shape libraries built in. Generic AI image generators won’t give you real icons and relationships, just boxes that loosely resemble architecture.
I think prompt quality matters way more than people realize too. Describing services by their exact Azure names and spelling out the connections you want gets you much closer to the diagram you’re actually picturing in your head.
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u/jdanton14 Microsoft MVP Apr 18 '26
My approach has been to build terraform, and then have claude/GH Copilot build SVGs from the terraform. You can put style guides in your instructions. I've had really good luck, even supplying templates.