Skip to content

Reading the graph

colourmeansreads as
greenmanagedchant declared it and the estate confirms it
amberforeignit is there, chant did not put it there
bluependingdeclared, not yet observed as deployed
greyneutralnothing deployed for this component yet

A node behold could not read is unobserved — reported as a hole, never painted as absent. “I did not look” and “it is gone” are different claims, and conflating them is how a viewer talks someone into deleting something.

From widest to narrowest:

  1. Components — the deploy units and the waves they go out in.
  2. Logical — an architecture diagram in the shape the substrate actually has. AWS nests region → VPC → subnet; Azure nests under the resource group; GCP is project → location, with no network containment, because the emulated GCP surface has no VPC to draw.
  3. Composites — the higher-level constructs your source declares.
  4. Resources — individual resources at their real provider names.
  5. Attributes — the properties on one resource.

On Kubernetes there is one tier further down, below anything you declared:

Runtime — the Pods, ReplicaSets and EndpointSlices the cluster created and maintains through ownerReferences. They are runtime children, not drift: nothing declared them and nothing should. This tier is why a healthy-looking Deployment in front of a dead Service is visible rather than green.

The API server records, per field, which manager last wrote it. chant compiled the manifest, so it knows which fields it authored. Put together, the inspect pane can say these fields are chant’s, spec.replicas is the HPA’s, and someone edited the image by hand.

Foreign-owned is shown as a distinct state from drifted. A field the HPA legitimately owns is not a problem, and colouring it like drift would recreate the noise that per-field ownership exists to remove.

An estate that spans providers keeps its edges: a managed cluster declared in your cloud lexicon and the workload running on it render connected, in the live view and not only in the source graph.