Drift Detection Overview

Drift Detection compares your actual cloud resources against your Terraform state to identify configuration drift — when real infrastructure has changed outside of Terraform.

What is Drift? Drift occurs when someone manually modifies a cloud resource (via the AWS/Azure/GCP console or CLI) without updating the Terraform code. This causes the actual resource to differ from the desired state in your configuration.

• From within a Workspace, navigate to the Drift Detection section
• Or click 'Drift Check' in the Workspace Dock

1. 1

   Drift Status Banner

   • Displayed at the top of the drift detection page
   • Shows the current drift status: Clean, Drifted, or Unknown
   • Shows the timestamp of the last drift check
   • Color-coded: Green (no drift), Red (drift detected), Gray (not checked yet)
2. 2

   Resource Drift Table

   • Lists all managed resources and their drift status
   • Columns:
   • Resource Type (e.g., aws_s3_bucket, azurerm_virtual_machine)
   • Resource Name
   • Drift Status (Drifted / Not Drifted)
   • Changes Detected (description of what changed)
   • Last Checked timestamp
   • Drifted resources are highlighted in red
3. 3

   Drift History Table

   • Shows a log of all past drift detection runs
   • Columns: Timestamp, Status, Resources Checked, Drifted Resources
   • Click a history entry to see the detailed results of that scan
4. 4

   Drift Schedule Card

   • Configure automated drift detection on a schedule
   • Cron-based scheduling (e.g., every 6 hours, daily at midnight)
   • Toggle automatic drift checking on or off
   • View the next scheduled run time
5. 5

   Manual Drift Check

   • Click 'Run Drift Check Now' to trigger an immediate scan
   • Results are available within minutes
   • Manual check also appears in the drift history

1. 1

   Review the drifted resources in the resource table
2. 2

   Determine whether the manual change should be accepted or reverted
3. 3

   If accepting the change: Update your Terraform code to reflect the new state, then run terraform apply
4. 4

   If reverting the change: Run terraform apply to restore the resource to the Terraform-defined state

• Run drift detection on a schedule (daily or after any change freeze period)
• Treat any detected drift as a priority issue to investigate and resolve