Discovery

Discovery is Guardrails' method for automatically searching virtual infrastructure, systems or applications to build a structured, searchable data representation. For example, resources in an AWS Account are discovered and stored in Guardrails.

Discovered resources are always mapped to Resource Types and stored in the Resource Hierarchy.

Discovery & Real-time Updates

Typically, Discovery & CMDB controls are used in combination to find new resources and track changes to them over time.

Discovery

Each resource type registers a Discovery control on it's parent type. The Discovery control is designed to find all instances of the resource types from the parent and upsert them into the Guardrails CMDB.

In effect, the parent resource is responsible for creating its children.

CMDB

Each resource type also registers a CMDB control on itself. The CMDB control queries the source for the latest and complete details about the resource.

In effect, a resource is considered to be an adult child, looking after itself.

Real-time Updates via Events

While Discovery and CMDB controls can find existing resources and update their details, Guardrails is designed to react in real-time to resource changes. This is achieved through event handling for create, update and delete events relating to a resource.