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Drift detection 🕵️

Overview​

Brainboard allows you to detect any drift happening to the cloud infrastructure, and in some cases it removes the root cause of the drift.

Detecting the drift​

To detect a drift happening to the cloud infrastructure you have 2 options. Both options are based on a workflow.

Actually, Brainboard is the only tool in the market that allows you to created multiple CI/CD workflows for the same infrastructure. You can for e.g. create a workflow for security checks, another one for costs and a third one to detect a drift.

Refer to this page if you want more information about workflows.

Manual workflow​

You can create a workflow to check if a drift has happened to the cloud infrastructure and run it manually as follows:

  1. Go the CI/CD page of the infrastructure by clicking on the rocket in the top bar
  2. Either create a new workflow by clicking on the button New workflow or use the public template called [Public] Drift detection by Brainboard: New workflow drift
  3. Once the workflow created, add a drift detection task and give it a name: Drift task
  4. Run the pipeline by clicking on the button on the top right called Run pipeline.

Scheduled automatic detection​

  1. Go the CI/CD page of the infrastructure by clicking on the rocket in the top bar
  2. Either create a new workflow by clicking on the button New workflow or use the public template called [Public] Drift detection by Brainboard: New workflow drift
  3. Open the settings of the workflow you just created: Workflow settings
  4. Activate the cron schedule and specify the frequency of the execution of the workflow Workflow schedule
  5. If you want to be notified when a drift is detected, enable Notify on failure and specify the email address(es) that will receive the notification.
tip

You can use this crontab generator to generate the right cron syntax.

Output​

When the pipeline runs (either manually or automatically), Brainboard creates an execution environment, run the detection and gives you the output:

Drift task output

info

When a drift is detected, the workflow will be marked as failed, because when a drift happens this is considered a failure by Brainboard as the infrastructure doesn't comply with the provisioned one.

Best practices​

It's a good practice to use the automatic scheduled drift detection, for both critical workloads in case anything unwanted happens outside of the source of truth, and for non-critical workloads to control costs and detect any modification that may increase them beyond the allowed budget.