name: system-landscape-diagram description: Show the systems and people across an organization or domain, emphasizing ownership and meaningful dependencies.
System landscape diagram
What it tells
A landscape is the broadest software architecture view: which systems, people, teams, or domains exist and how they relate. It tells an audience where a system sits in a wider estate, not how its internals work.
Use and boundaries
Use it for portfolio orientation, modernization planning, ownership conversations, integration discovery, and explaining a system's neighbors. Choose one organizational or domain scope and state it in the title. Avoid showing classes, containers, deployment hosts, or detailed request sequences; those belong in narrower companion views.
Method
Start with the audience's question and inventory only systems relevant to it. Group by business domain, ownership, or environment—not arbitrary spatial decoration. Give each node a stable name and concise purpose. Draw only relationships that support a decision, label them with a verb, and distinguish dependency from data movement or responsibility. Mark uncertainty rather than inventing an integration.
Renderer routing
Honor the user's source choice. For a C4-style landscape, use structurizr when the landscape belongs to a reusable workspace model or c4plantuml for a focused source file. Use plantuml for a custom UML-like view, or mermaid, d2, and graphviz for compact relationship maps. blockdiag can express simple blocks but does not supply C4 semantics. Check the selected renderer's supported syntax in diagram.zip docs before writing source.
Style and review
Use one shape family for systems and another for people or organizations. Cluster sparingly, keep edge crossings low, and provide a legend for colors, line types, ownership, and trust boundaries. Prefer labels and patterns over color-only coding. Review for accidental detail, duplicate nodes, unlabeled arrows, missing external actors, and a scope that is too broad to read.
Prior art and limits
This follows the C4 landscape/context framing, which is notation-independent; it is not a formal ArchiMate exchange model. ArchiMate viewpoints could add standardized enterprise-architecture semantics, but diagram.zip has no dedicated ArchiMate renderer/skill yet. Consider integration if conformance or model interchange is required. See C4 diagrams, C4 notation, and ArchiMate overview.