In my experience it tends not to be done because there's an inevitable drift between the system as it actually operates and the relevant visualizations and diag

In my experience it tends not to be done because there's an inevitable drift between the system as it actually operates and the relevant visualizations and diagrams. I have seen them used as a starting off point at times, although that's also been infrequent. There is however a growing movement of being able to visualize how a system is functioning at various levels. XState/Statecharts are a good example (https://xstate.js.org/viz/ https://xstate.js.org/viz/). Another example in the Ops space would be https://github.com/spekt8/spekt8 https://github.com/spekt8/spekt8 for K8S. I work at Grafana and we're more or less trying to expose these things in ways that make sense. Our bread and butter is timeseries data but we're adding more in that regard (it's possible to build node graphs from running systems).