Technology Radar: Visualize Your Tech Landscape at a Glance

Every architecture has a technology story. Which languages power your backend? What databases do your services rely on? Is that new framework spreading through your containers, or is it stuck in a single experiment?

Until now, answering these questions in Archyl meant opening each element one by one and reading the technology field. The information was there, but it was scattered — attached to individual systems, containers, and components with no way to see the big picture.

Today we're shipping two connected features that change this: Technology Management and the Technology Radar.

Attaching Technologies to Your Architecture

Every C4 element — system, container, component — and every relationship can now have one or more technologies attached to it. When editing an element, you'll find a technology selector that lets you pick from a catalog of known technologies or create your own.

Each technology has a category — programming language, framework, database, message broker, cloud service, DevOps tool, and more. Archyl ships with icons for hundreds of common technologies, so your diagrams and lists are immediately recognizable.

Technologies attached to relationships are just as important. If a container talks to a database over gRPC, or a service communicates with another through RabbitMQ, that transport layer is now explicit and trackable.

The Radar View

Navigate to the Technologies page from the sidebar, and you'll land on the radar.

The radar organizes every technology in your organization into four quadrants:

• Languages & Runtimes — Go, TypeScript, Python, Java, and everything your code runs on
• Frameworks & Libraries — React, Spring Boot, Express, Django — the structural choices inside your containers
• Data & Messaging — PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ — where your data lives and how it moves
• Infrastructure & Tools — Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions — the platform underneath

Within each quadrant, technologies are placed into concentric rings based on how widely they're used across your architecture:

• Core — Used by 4 or more elements. These are foundational. Changing them is a major decision.
• Active — Used by 2-3 elements. Established and growing.
• Emerging — Used by a single element. Just getting started — worth watching.
• Registered — Cataloged but not yet linked to any element.

The placement is automatic. You don't maintain the radar manually. As you attach technologies to your architecture elements, the radar updates itself.

Filtering and Exploring

The radar isn't static. Click any quadrant label to filter down to just that category. Click a ring pill in the header to isolate a single adoption tier — the selected ring highlights while the rest fades, making it easy to focus on what matters.

A search field lets you find technologies by name. Combine it with quadrant and ring filters to answer questions like "which databases are in our Core tier?" or "what emerging frameworks have we started using?"

Active filters appear as chips below the search bar. Clear them individually or all at once.

The Detail Panel

Click any technology blip on the radar — or any row in the table view — and a detail panel slides in from the right.

At the top: the technology name, its category, quadrant, and ring placement, along with an explanation of what that ring means.

Below that, the panel shows:

Usage Statistics

How many elements reference this technology, and how many relationships use it. A relative adoption bar shows how it compares to the most-used technology in your organization.

Most Often Associated With

This section shows the technologies that most frequently appear alongside the selected one. If you click on Go and see PostgreSQL, Docker, and gRPC listed — that's your Go stack pattern, derived directly from how your architecture is actually wired.

Each entry is clickable. Click a related technology and the panel switches to it, letting you explore the technology graph without leaving the sidebar.

Related Elements

Every C4 element that uses this technology is listed here — every system, container, and component. Click any element and you'll navigate directly to that project's diagram, with the element selected and the correct C4 level loaded.

This is where the radar connects back to the architecture. You're not just seeing that "PostgreSQL is Core" — you're seeing exactly which containers use it, and you can jump to any of them in one click.

Table View

Switch to the table view for a structured, scannable list. Technologies are grouped by quadrant and ring, sorted by usage. Each row shows the technology icon, name, and a usage bar. Click any row to open the same detail panel.

The table view works well for audits and reviews — when you need to walk through your entire technology portfolio systematically rather than exploring visually.

Why Track Technologies at the Architecture Level?

Most teams track their tech stack in spreadsheets, wikis, or internal developer portals. These lists go stale because they're disconnected from the architecture they describe. Someone adds a new service with a new database, and the wiki doesn't get updated.

In Archyl, the technology information lives on the architecture elements themselves. When a team attaches Redis to a new container, the radar updates. When a service is removed, the technologies it used drop in adoption count. The radar is always current because it reads from the model.

This makes several workflows concrete:

• Technology standardization — See at a glance how many different databases or frameworks your organization uses. If you're trying to consolidate, the radar shows exactly where the outliers are.
• Migration tracking — Moving from one technology to another? Watch the old one drop from Core to Active to Emerging as teams migrate, while the new one climbs.
• Onboarding — New engineers can see the full technology landscape of the organization in seconds, with links to the exact elements that use each technology.
• Risk assessment — A technology in the Emerging ring with a single element is low-risk to replace. A technology in the Core ring touching 15 containers across 4 projects is a different conversation entirely.

Getting Started

The Technology Radar is available now on all plans. Start by attaching technologies to your existing architecture elements — open any system, container, or component, and use the technology selector in the edit panel.

Once you've tagged a few elements, head to the Technologies page in the sidebar. The radar builds itself from there.

For teams building their architecture model from scratch, start with the Introduction to the C4 Model. If you want your technologies discovered automatically, AI-Powered Architecture Discovery detects technologies as part of the discovery process. And to understand what happens when you change a core technology, Impact Radar shows the blast radius before you commit.