What are diagrams?

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Overview

Diagrams in Azure Documenter let you create architectural diagrams that represent a business orchestration using resources from your Azure subscriptions.

Business value

Diagrams give teams a clear, visual view of why specific resources exist and how they support a business orchestration. This makes it easier to communicate architecture and resource relationships without maintaining diagrams manually outside of Azure Documenter.

How it works

A diagram lets you choose resources from multiple subscriptions and associate them to form a single business architecture. This cross-subscription association is what distinguishes Diagrams from a simple resource list.

Multiple diagrams

You can create multiple diagrams to visualize distinct sets of resources used by different business orchestrations, rather than combining everything into a single diagram.

Resource status

A resource icon appears in red under either of these conditions:

  • The resource is no longer available in the selected Azure subscription.
  • The service principal used to connect the resource to the diagram has been removed from Azure Documenter.

Toolbar

The diagram toolbar provides a variety of shapes for building out a diagram, along with a Notes option for adding key points directly to the diagram.

FAQs

  1. Can a single diagram include resources from more than one subscription?
    Yes. Diagrams let you choose resources from multiple subscriptions and associate them to form a single business architecture.

  2. Can I create more than one diagram?
    Yes. You can create multiple diagrams to represent distinct resource sets used by different business orchestrations.

  3. Why does a resource icon show as red on a diagram?
    Either the resource is no longer available in the selected subscription, or the service principal used to connect it has been removed from Azure Documenter.

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