Why environments exist

A whole cloud estate is too big to look at in one go. An environment is a meaningful slice of it: the resources in one network, everything in one cluster, or everything exposed to the internet. Each environment gets its own diagrams, resource list and history, so you can open the part you care about.

Every environment belongs to one workspace, and it is either Auto-discovered (Kumo.io made it) or Custom (someone on your team defined it).

Environments Kumo.io finds for you

After every sync, Kumo.io looks at what it found and identifies environments from the kinds of resources present. It doesn't rely on tags or naming conventions, so it works on estates that aren't tidily labelled.

One per network or cluster:

Networks that hold nothing but the default scaffolding a cloud creates for you, such as the default VPC in every AWS region, are skipped. You only get an environment for a network with something of yours in it.

Workspace-wide views of one concern:

When an auto-discovered environment changes or goes away

Kumo.io re-derives auto-discovered environments on every sync, so their membership follows your estate.

• If an environment's network or cluster disappears from your cloud, Kumo.io retires the environment and its diagrams. If it comes back, so does the environment.
• If an environment ends up with no resources at all, Kumo.io archives it; it reappears when resources do.
• Retired and archived environments are hidden from the environment list.

You can't rename, delete or merge an auto-discovered environment. If you need a different grouping, create a custom environment.

Custom environments

A custom environment is defined by a membership query, and Kumo.io re-evaluates it on every sync. Kumo.io never retires a custom environment.

To create one, open Inventory › Environments, filter to a workspace (a new environment belongs to one), and select Create Environment. You can also start from a filtered view of resources with Save as Environment.

In the New environment dialog:

1. Enter a Name, such as "Production".
2. Build the Membership Query. Either tick Every Resource in the Workspace to take the whole graph, or add conditions: a Semantic Type (the kind of resource), narrowed by attributes such as tags.env = prod. Use + Condition to narrow a branch, and + Branch to add an alternative; branches are combined with "or".
3. Optionally Expand Neighborhood (Traverse) to pull in connected resources: choose the direction, the depth, and which connection types to follow.
4. Optionally set Limit Result (the default is 100).
5. Select Preview Matches to see how many resources and connections match at the latest snapshot. A plain-language summary of the query updates as you edit.
6. Select Create & evaluate.

If the workspace hasn't synced yet, the environment is evaluated automatically after the first sync.

The environment page

The Environments list shows each environment with its cloud scope, resource count, diagrams and data state. You can filter by Workspace, Provider, Origin (Auto-discovered or Custom) and more, and use the Favourites and Needs Attention tabs.

Open an environment to see its Overview, Resources, Diagrams, Changes & History and Settings tabs. For an auto-discovered environment, Discovery Origin says which rule found it and from which resource. The Membership Rule section shows the rule that defines membership, with Evaluate Now to re-run it without waiting for a sync.

The Data State column tells you how current an environment is:

From the command line

kumo environment list --workspace <workspace-id>
kumo environment resources --workspace <workspace-id> --environment <environment-id>

environment list includes the environments Kumo.io discovered. environment resources lists an environment's current members. See the CLI reference.

Next steps

• Views and diagrams: the diagrams Kumo.io draws for each environment.
• How syncing works: when environments are re-identified.