Most cloud architecture diagrams are out of date the day after someone draws them. Tools that generate the diagram from your real accounts fix that, and they are the part of this market people like most. But two complaints come up again and again in reviews: the map turns into an unreadable, slow hairball once an estate passes a few thousand resources, and a map on its own doesn’t tell you what to do. As one reviewer put it, “only visualisation does not help.”
Cloud Sleuth’s live cloud map starts from the same place, an architecture diagram generated from your real AWS and Azure accounts through read-only APIs, and then fixes both of those.
How it works
- Drawn from the real estate. The map is built from the inventory Cloud Sleuth collects, so it shows what is actually running, not what someone remembered to draw. It follows changes from CloudTrail and the Azure Activity Log instead of waiting for a nightly batch.
- Scoped, not a hairball. Filter the map to one team, service, application, account, subscription, region or VPC. Because every resource has an owner, “show me what the payments team runs” is one click, and you see the 40 boxes that matter instead of all 4,000.
- Owner, cost and findings on every box. Each resource carries its owner (from tags, or inferred with a confidence score), its monthly cost and any open findings, so the map answers “whose is this and does it need attention?” at a glance.
- What changed. Compare the map with last week’s and see what was added, removed or reconnected, and who made the change.
- Relationships that matter. Network paths, attachments, IAM relationships, load balancer targets and IaC ownership, so you can see what a resource supports before anyone touches it.
- Take it with you. Export any view to draw.io, Mermaid, SVG or PNG, for design reviews, audits and runbooks. Your diagram isn’t locked inside the tool.
- AWS and Azure at parity. Both clouds in one map and one schema from day one. GCP and Kubernetes come next.
Illustrative example - commands not final. Map one team’s resources in production and open the result:
sleuth map --team payments --account prod --open
sleuth map --vpc vpc-0a12 --since 7d --format mermaid > payments-vpc.mdWhy it matters
Platform engineers use a live diagram to understand an estate they didn’t build. Engineering managers use it to see what their team actually runs. Before a cleanup, a migration or an incident review, it’s the fastest way to see what depends on what.
What makes Cloud Sleuth’s map different is that it sits on the same inventory as ownership, cleanup, allocation and guardrails. The box you click on already knows who owns it, what it costs, whether it’s safe to remove and which policy findings are open, and the next step goes straight to the owner.
Cloud Sleuth CLI vs. Cloud Sleuth Cloud
The Cloud Sleuth CLI generates the live map of your own AWS accounts and Azure subscriptions on your machine, with filters and export, and nothing leaves your environment. Cloud Sleuth Cloud is planned to add a shared, always-on map across every account and team, history and change diffs, and GCP and Kubernetes.
Both are pre-launch. Get early access to hear first when they are ready.