We had released our powerful visualization tool for AWS few months back to visualize the relationship among different types of AWS resources (e.g. vpc, subnet etc). You can visualize AWS resources in MechCloud after discovering these either manually or using a fully automated approach where resources are discovered automatically as these are created or a specific tag is added to the existing resources, without running discovery manually.

You can find detailed documentation for real-time visualization here.

Advantages

• Immediate Detection of Anomalies: Real-time visualization allows for the immediate detection of any abnormal changes or issues within your AWS environment, enabling quicker response and resolution.

• Enhanced Security Monitoring: By visualizing resources in real-time, you can better monitor security configurations and ensure compliance with security policies.

• Improved Resource Management: It helps in managing resources more efficiently by providing a clear view of resource utilization and dependencies, which can lead to cost optimization.

• Simplified Troubleshooting: Real-time visualization aids in troubleshooting by providing a clear and up-to-date view of the infrastructure, making it easier to identify and resolve issues.

• Better Collaboration: Teams can collaborate more effectively with a shared, real-time view of the infrastructure, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

• Faster Onboarding: New team members can understand the infrastructure more quickly with real-time visualizations, speeding up their learning process.

• Historical Tracking: It allows for tracking changes over time, providing insights into how the infrastructure has evolved and helping in planning future changes.

Discovering the resources manually

Here are the steps to discover the AWS resources manually -

• AWS Console

  • Add an identity provider

  • Create an IAM role

• MechCloud Console

  • Configure an AWS account

You can find details for each of these steps in this blog post.

Once everything is configured as described above, follow the steps as shown in the below demo to discover your AWS resources.

Discovering the resources automatically

Manual discovery is useful when you want to find all existing or brownfield resources in an AWS account. However, running the discovery manually is inconvenient and at the same time you miss out on the benefits of real-time discovery.

Discovering existing or brownfield resources automatically

In order to discover the existing or brownfield resources manually, you first need to follow the steps at described here.

Once you have all the eventbridge rules, queues, lambda function in place as described in the previous step, you are ready to discover your existing or brownfield resources. Here are the steps to discover an aws resources just by tagging it with a special tag -

• First you need to make sure that tag based sync mechanism is selected for your aws account in MechCloud as shown below -

• Log on to MechCloud console and navigate to Infrastructure -> Discover Assets.

• Select a team and one or more AWS accounts whose resources you want to discover in the real-time.

• Click on Enable Real-time Updates button.

• Now go to AWS console and simply add a tag named Mc-Asset-Name with a value of your choice to an aws resource and it will be discovered automatically in MechCloud. In order to delete the vpc from MechCloud, simply remove Mc-Asset-Name tag from it**.**

• Go ahead and delete the Mc-Asset-Name tag for the vpc created in the previous step and it will deleted from MechCloud UI automatically. Deleting an AWS vpc using MechCloud chatbot will be supported shortly.

Discovering new or greenfield resources automatically

In order to discover new or greenfield resources automatically,

• First update the sync mechanism to Audit Logs for your aws account in MechCloud.

• Go to discover asset UI and make sure real-time updates are enabled.

• Create a new aws resource using our chatbot or AWS cli / console and it will reflect immediately on the UI.

• Go ahead and delete the vpc using AWS cli or console and it will deleted from MechCloud UI automatically. Deleting an AWS vpc using MechCloud chatbot will be supported shortly.

Summary

Released a few months ago, MechCloud is a powerful visualization tool for AWS that enables real-time visualization and discovery of AWS resources. It offers both manual and automated resource discovery methods, enhancing immediate anomaly detection, security monitoring, resource management, troubleshooting, collaboration, onboarding, and historical tracking. Manual discovery steps involve configuring AWS and MechCloud, while automatic discovery uses tag-based sync and audit logs for real-time updates. This ensures more efficient and quicker resource management and monitoring.

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