Reading the graph
The colours
Section titled “The colours”| colour | means | reads as |
|---|---|---|
| green | managed | chant declared it and the estate confirms it |
| amber | foreign | it is there, chant did not put it there |
| blue | pending | declared, not yet observed as deployed |
| grey | neutral | nothing 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.
The zoom dial
Section titled “The zoom dial”From widest to narrowest:
- Components — the deploy units and the waves they go out in.
- Logical — an architecture diagram in the shape the substrate actually has. AWS nests
region → VPC → subnet; Azure nests under the resource group; GCP isproject → location, with no network containment, because the emulated GCP surface has no VPC to draw. - Composites — the higher-level constructs your source declares.
- Resources — individual resources at their real provider names.
- 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.
Field ownership, on Kubernetes
Section titled “Field ownership, on Kubernetes”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.
Cross-substrate edges
Section titled “Cross-substrate edges”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.