Having spent over 18 years in cloud management, one recurring challenge I’ve seen organizations face is the lack of true visibility into their cloud environments. Companies struggle to gain the right insights into their architecture, resources, costs, and other critical factors—especially in a way that aligns with their unique needs. 

Native cloud provider consoles often fall short, failing to deliver the comprehensive and actionable views organizations need to manage their infrastructure effectively.

While many tools claim to solve this problem, most fall short in several key areas:

• They don’t provide a complete inventory of your cloud environment.
• They overlook essential SaaS-based services critical to your operations.
• They fail to deliver the relevant data necessary to understand whether your cloud is being properly managed, especially through infrastructure-as-code.

These gaps make it challenging to operationalize and maintain a well-architected and efficient cloud environment. True visibility is more than a luxury—it’s a necessity for ensuring compliance, optimizing costs, and empowering teams to manage their cloud with confidence. 

Firefly bridges these gaps by providing unparalleled visibility into your cloud environment, eliminating inefficiencies, reducing headaches, and replacing uncertainty with clarity and control. 

With Firefly, you get:

Cross-Cloud Inventory

Firefly’s Inventory provides a comprehensive, unified view of your cloud resources across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and 14 SaaS-based applications, including Okta, Datadog, New Relic, Cloudflare, MongoDB, and more. With Firefly, you can seamlessly manage resources across multiple platforms with unmatched visibility and efficiency.

The Inventory offers powerful filtering options, enabling you to sort resources by location, asset type, tags, owner, type of IaC created, and more. For instance, if you’re looking for all r5.2xlarge EC2 instances, Firefly’s robust search capabilities make it simple to locate them along with all their relevant metadata.

Firefly also allows you to break down your inventory by asset categories or specific types, providing insights into the quantity and health of each asset. For every resource, you can easily view its current IaC status, such as codified, ghost, unmanaged, or drifted—helping you quickly identify where action is needed.

The Inventory makes it easy to spot resources with unmanaged or incomplete tags, ensuring compliance with tagging policies. Additionally, you can identify and analyze relationships between resources, providing a deeper understanding of your cloud environment.

To streamline your workflows, Firefly allows you to create and save custom views. These views let you apply filters and settings to quickly access the cloud workloads you frequently manage—making your day-to-day operations more efficient and organized.

With Firefly’s Cross-Cloud Inventory, you gain unmatched control and visibility over your cloud resources, enabling you to confidently manage and optimize your cloud footprint.

Resource Visibility

Firefly empowers you with detailed visibility into every resource in your inventory. Each resource is enriched with comprehensive metadata, including:

• Resource ID
• Data source
• Owner
• Location
• Properties and tags
• IaC stack (if applicable)
• Code repository links (if applicable)
• Complete configuration details

Firefly also provides insights into historical and ongoing events, configuration changes, relationships between resources, and architectural diagrams that visually represent these connections.

One of the most powerful features is traceability—from the resource back to its IaC stack and code. For teams managing infrastructure via Terraform or similar tools, this means you can:

• Identify which Terraform state file a resource is associated with
• Locate the state file and its exact location
• Access the code managing the resource

This level of detail helps eliminate configuration drift and orphaned (“ghost”) resources. By enabling teams to trace every component of their infrastructure, Firefly makes it easier to manage changes, enforce compliance, and maintain a clean, well-documented environment.

IaC Visibility

Firefly’s IaC visibility fills a longstanding gap in cloud management. The IaC Inventory provides complete visibility into all components of your infrastructure-as-code, offering traceability from your state files to the assets they manage, the backends where they’re stored, and the modules they utilize.

With Firefly, you gain:

• State File Insights: Traceability into state file locations, the backends hosting them, and the assets they manage.
• Backend Inventory: A detailed view of your backends, showing which state files are stored where.
• Module Inventory: Comprehensive insights into the modules used across your state files.
• Code Traceability: Visibility into the repositories and code managing your cloud resources, connecting your architecture from code to cloud.

Firefly takes it further by allowing you to filter IaC resources by attributes such as IaC status, data source, backend, asset type, repository, Terraform version, provider, and module usage. This granular filtering helps you quickly identify and address critical aspects of your infrastructure.

For example, you can easily locate outdated modules or multiple versions of Terraform in use, enabling you to update or consolidate them for a more streamlined environment.

Beyond Terraform, Firefly extends its visibility to other IaC languages, including CloudFormation, Helm, Argo, Pulumi, and Kustomize. This multi-language support ensures that your entire infrastructure—regardless of the IaC tool used—is fully visible and manageable.

With Firefly’s IaC visibility, you gain the insights and tools needed to optimize your infrastructure, reduce complexity, and maintain a well-orchestrated cloud environment.

Cross-Cloud Governance Visibility

Compliance and governance are critical areas where many organizations struggle to maintain visibility. With multiple compliance frameworks to adhere to—such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, and HIPAA—understanding how your cloud resources align with these requirements can be overwhelming.

Firefly addresses this challenge by providing visibility into compliance and governance across all your cloud environments. It enables you to:

• Identify Violations: Quickly pinpoint assets that are out of compliance with specific frameworks.
• Filter by Importance: Focus on critical resources that must adhere to specific regulations, ensuring you address the most vital areas first.
• Framework-Level Insights: View your overall compliance status across multiple frameworks, providing a clear understanding of where you stand and what needs improvement.

Firefly’s governance visibility goes beyond frameworks, offering detailed insights into individual assets. When working within the Inventory, you can see governance and policy violations directly on each resource. This means that for any given asset, you can immediately determine whether it violates a policy and, if so, address it right from the same interface.

One of Firefly’s standout features is bidirectional traceability. You can trace from a policy back to the affected assets, or from an asset to the applicable policies. This ensures you have a clear understanding of how policies impact your environment and how your resources align with governance requirements.

With Firefly’s cross-cloud governance visibility, you gain the tools needed to simplify compliance, enforce policies, and maintain a secure and compliant cloud environment—all in one platform.

Workflows

Firefly’s Workflows offer another layer of visibility into your infrastructure and IaC processes, providing comprehensive insights into your CI/CD pipeline. With Firefly Workflows, you can:

• Monitor Pipeline Status: Track the status of your pipeline runs, identify issues or errors, and review details of the entire plan and apply process.
• Plan and Apply Details: Gain visibility into resources being created, destroyed, imported, or modified.
• Tag Coverage Insights: Assess tag coverage for all resources impacted by a plan or apply.
• Policy and Cost Analysis: Scan for policy violations and evaluate the cost impact of every apply action.

Firefly Workflows also provide insights into the underlying code and the output of the Terraform initialization process (terraform init). You can access detailed information about each resource being processed, including:

• Cost Breakdown: See the cost associated with each resource.
• Policy Violations: Identify any compliance issues.
• Tag Coverage: Review the tag status for every resource.
• Resource Plans: Dive into the specific plan for each resource.

A standout feature of Firefly Workflows is its traceability. From any plan or apply process, you can trace directly to the affected assets in your inventory. This allows you to seamlessly switch to viewing only the impacted resources, making it easier to understand the full scope and implications of your changes.

Firefly Workflows ensure that every step of your CI/CD pipeline is transparent, actionable, and aligned with your cloud management goals. This level of integration empowers teams to proactively manage their infrastructure, reduce errors, and maintain compliance with ease.

Analytics

Firefly doesn’t stop at providing visibility—it also delivers powerful analytics to help you gain deeper insights into your cloud environment. These analytics provide detailed metrics on:

• Asset State Over Time: Track changes to your assets and understand how your environment evolves.
• Tag Coverage Trends: Monitor tag coverage over time to ensure resources are properly tagged for compliance and management.
• Resource Metrics: Analyze total assets, codified assets, drifted assets, and their associated drift cost impacts.
• Cloud Waste: Identify unused or underutilized resources contributing to cloud waste, enabling cost optimization.

Firefly’s analytics can be filtered by time period, cloud provider, or specific resource categories, giving you precise control over your data. You can also export these metrics for deeper analysis or reporting, making it easy to share insights with stakeholders or integrate them into broader business processes.

With Firefly’s analytics, you gain actionable intelligence to make informed decisions, optimize costs, and improve the efficiency and governance of your cloud environment.

To see Firefly at work firsthand, try it out for yourself or request a demo.