Multiplayer Launches GA with New System Auto-Documentation Features

We launched Multiplayer in August 2023, and after hundreds of calls to validate our assumptions about what tools developers needed, we launched our first beta in February, 2024. Since then, the number of conversations we’ve had about Multiplayer has grown into the thousands.

We can confidently say that teams need a collaborative tool purpose-built for the complicated and multi-layered system architectures that underpin most companies’ operations.

Today, we’re proud to announce that Multiplayer is now in General Availability and we're introducing our system auto-documentation feature in Beta.

Discover what Multiplayer can do for your team today with a free 30-day trial of all of our features.

Multiplayer is Ready for Teams

In our discussions with engineering leaders, we identified three common pain points:

• Missing or incorrect system architecture and API documentation
• Scattered documentation across multiple resources
• Accumulated architectural technical debt with no easy fix

The priority of engineering teams is to ship functional software on a schedule but they have to rely on clunky and inefficient legacy diagramming tools or dedicate significant time and resources to maintaining critical system assets (diagrams, design documents, etc.) across many knowledge repositories.

Multiplayer aims to make system design and architecture documentation effortless for engineering teams.

It’s a beautifully designed tool that helps your team achieve these goals:

• Visualize and interact with your system in real-time. With a few clicks, access an up-to-date view of your entire system architecture, including components, dependencies, and integrations. Eliminate drift within your software system; use Open Telemetry to get accurate, real-time information, understand system behavior, catch breaking changes early, and make informed decisions.
• Reduce maintenance overhead. Multiplayer automatically discovers, tracks, and detects drift in your system architecture, dependencies and APIs by directly connecting to your infrastructure. You no longer have to invest time and resources in manually creating and updating static diagrams or system architecture documentation.
• Effortlessly reach consensus on system design. Quickly align will all the relevant stakeholders (developers, architects, QA, DevOps, PMs, etc.) before you jump into code. Implement lightweight system design reviews within your agile practice, to avoid misunderstandings, backtracking, unnecessary rework and the accumulation of architectural technical debt.
• Single source of truth and version control. Consolidate all your technical assets into a single, secure location. Safeguard your platform's knowledge and cut down on unproductive meetings with a living archive of your system's evolution, capturing every decision, change, and rationale.

One of our early adopters, insurance technology provider FilingRamp, relies on Multiplayer to service some of the largest insurance carriers in the U.S. As their CEO, Jeremy Battles, states:

"We build on Multiplayer because clients trust us to get their products to market faster and store their filings data securely. By auto-documenting our system architecture with Multiplayer,  our developers can focus on important feature development instead of documentation.”

Available Today in Beta: System Auto-Documentation

Today, Multiplayer is thrilled to introduce the System Auto-Documentation feature set in Beta. Engineering teams can gain full visibility into their IT architecture and auto-document every technical decision and change to their platform.

This marks a revolution in how teams visualize and document software systems. Previously, teams relied on general-purpose diagramming and whiteboarding tools that produced static and incomplete abstractions, leading to wasted time searching for information or, worse, making decisions based on outdated data.

Modern engineering teams require tools that embrace complexity and support dynamic system design, far surpassing the capabilities of traditional diagramming tools.

That’s why we built a tool that combines high-level abstractions with the ability to dive deep into the tech stack, offering up-to-date information on any component, structure, or relationship, and fostering collaborative problem-solving.

Why is System Auto-Documentation Important?

Technical debt is estimated to account for 20-40% of a company’s technology assets, with organizations investing over 30% of their IT budget and more than 20% of their IT human resources to manage it.

The majority of this debt originates from decisions made during the system design process (e.g. architectural style, tech stack, and development methodologies, etc.), and it’s known as architectural technical debt (ATD). ATD is often more complex and costly to resolve than code-level debt and can impede innovation, stifling the organization's growth and competitive edge.

Gartner forecasts that by 2026, ATD will comprise 80% of all technical debt.

Many organizations are already implementing strategies to manage it, but the biggest challenge remains its invisibility. Without proper tools, visualizing the entire system architecture in real-time is a daunting task, often relegated to manual, general-purpose diagramming tools.

System architecture documentation is crucial for achieving visibility into your IT architecture and effectively managing architectural technical debt.

Multiplayer’s new embedded observability features auto-document data flows and system architecture down to the component level, including dependencies and APIs.

Leveraging OpenTelemetry for System Auto-Documentation

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. It’s a vendor- and tool-agnostic, open source Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, born out of the need to standardize how to instrument code and send telemetry data to an observability backend.

By leveraging OpenTelemetry, Multiplayer captures distributed traces from your system, alerting you of any architectural drift and saving you from manually reconciling your system architecture visualization with its real-world state.

On a Mission to Make Documentation Painless

System architecture documentation is vital for any software system, especially in large, complex distributed systems. Yet, it’s still one of the more painful and overlooked tasks that engineering teams face.

The reasons are obvious:

• It’s still a mostly manual process.
• Information is scattered across multiple sources of knowledge (e.g. Jira, GitHub, Confluence, Slack, Notion, Google Doc’s, and even coworkers' memories).
• An up-to-date view of your system architecture requires constant maintenance which wastes a ton of developer time.

When you have great documentation it accelerates work efficiency, eases stakeholder collaboration, and simplifies onboarding for new team members. Automating system documentation reduces human error, ensures consistency, and keeps information up-to-date, saving time and resources.

“When changes aren’t tracked, bad things happen - bad code, redundancy, technical debt, a lack of cohesion and the risk of losing everything when a key person walks out the door. We’ve removed the need to manually create and update system documentation so your actual running system can be your source of truth.” - Thomas Johnson, Multiplayer CTO

Multiplayer is on a mission to make system architecture documentation painless by capturing and retaining every platform change automatically, so you can spend time where it matters most—bringing your software to life.

Your insights are invaluable as we strive to make Multiplayer the go-to platform for system design and architecture documentation 💜

So, Try Multiplayer now, explore its features, and let us know how we can improve it to better serve your needs!