Overview

Cloudcraft offers a powerful, live read-only visualization tool for cloud architecture, enabling you to explore, analyze, and manage your infrastructure with ease. Not to be confused with the Standalone Cloudcraft documentation, this guide outlines the functionality, setup, and use cases of Cloudcraft in Datadog, detailing its benefits for various user personas, and highlighting key features and capabilities.

Cloudcraft’s core functionality is its ability to generate detailed architecture diagrams. These diagrams visually represent AWS cloud resources, allowing you to explore and analyze your environments. Cloudcraft’s diagrams are optimized for clarity and performance, providing an intuitive interface for navigating large-scale deployments. This helps teams to:

• Trace incidents back to their root causes through infrastructure dependencies.
• Determine if infrastructure is the cause of an incident, such as cross-region traffic causing latency or increased costs.
• Analyze and address the most relevant security misconfigurations.
• Onboard new team members.
• Accelerate incident MTTR and proactive governance tasks by simplifying infrastructure navigation.

Prerequisites

• Resource collection must be enabled for your AWS accounts.
• For the best experience, Datadog strongly recommends using the AWS-managed SecurityAudit policy, or the more permissive ReadOnlyAccess policy.
• To view security misconfigurations on the Security findings overlay, Cloud Security must be enabled.

Note: Cloudcraft adapts to restrictive permissions by excluding inaccessible resources. For example, if you opt to not grant permission to list S3 buckets, the diagram will simply exclude those buckets. If permissions block certain resources, an alert is displayed in the UI.

Getting started

To get started using Cloudcraft, navigate to Infrastructure > Resources > Cloudcraft. Select one or more accounts, regions, and resources. The diagram automatically displays the Infrastructure diagram.

Note: The account name in the Account dropdown originates from your AWS account tags in the AWS integration tile.

Group By

With Group By, Cloudcraft divides your diagram into distinct sections based on different group types. This feature offers a clear and organized perspective of your resources, making it especially helpful for visualizing complex cloud environments.

Enable the Show All Controls toggle to display the available Group By options. You can also remove specific groupings by unchecking options like VPC and Region. To view the current nesting structure and add the Network ACL (Network Access Control List) layer, click the More dropdown.

Saved views

Saved views allow you to save specific filters on your diagram that are most important to you, enabling efficient troubleshooting with scoped queries on your accounts, regions, environments, and resources.

To apply a saved view to your diagram:

• Navigate to Infrastructure > Resources > Cloudcraft. Select one or more accounts, regions, and resources. Apply any desired filters to your saved view, then click +Save as new view.
• Select the desired saved view from the menu at the top of the diagram view. The diagram automatically updates to reflect the chosen view.

Explore resources

Use the zoom and hover features to pinpoint the most critical resources. As you zoom in, additional resource names become visible. Hovering over a resource reveals a hover panel with basic information. Clicking on a resource opens a side panel that displays its Datadog observability, cost information, and security data, with cross-links to other Datadog products where relevant.

Filtering and search

Diagrams can be filtered by tags, such as team, application, or service, allowing you to concentrate on relevant resources while maintaining context through connected resources. Additionally, Cloudcraft provides a powerful search and highlight feature, enabling ease of location of specific resources or groups of resources.

Click the +Filter menu to quickly filter your resources by commonly used tags such as service, team, region, and more. Additionally, click the More Filters option to filter by AWS tags, custom tags, and terraform tags. The filter option reloads the diagram to display only the infrastructure that matches the filter criteria.

Search and highlight

Use the search bar to locate resources on the diagram by name, ID, or tag. This feature is highly effective for finding specific resources within your cloud architecture. It highlights the search criteria in the diagram, without creating a new diagram, by greying out the elements that do not match the search criteria.

Next steps

Learn how to navigate between built-in overlays to view your architecture from different perspectives. Each overlay is designed to support specific operational goals, such as:

• Infrastructure: High-level view of services and resources.
• Agent: Visualize where the Datadog Agent is installed and reporting from.
• Security: IAM, firewall, and security group visibility.
• Cloud Cost Management: Track and optimize resource spend.

Further reading

Más enlaces, artículos y documentación útiles:

Plan new architectures and track your cloud footprint with Cloudcraft (Standalone)BLOG