When Incidents Don't Tell the Whole Story
Every cloud outage has two stories — what you see now, and what really happened.
A cost spike.
A permission error.
A failing deployment.
On the surface, everything looks fine — dashboards are green, systems are running, and CI/CD shows success.
But somewhere in the past 48 hours, something drifted.
A subnet was updated.
A "temporary" IAM role got permanent privileges.
A configuration pushed in staging leaked into production.
By the time teams notice, the logs are buried, the timelines are blurred, and the truth is lost in screenshots and Slack threads.
You can't fix what you can't replay.
The Problem With Traditional Visibility
The modern cloud runs faster than our ability to document it.
Hundreds of deployments, thousands of config files, and millions of dependencies change daily.
Dashboards capture now — not how you got here.
That's why incident reviews often turn into detective work:
DevOps checks pipelines.
Security checks IAM diffs.
FinOps checks billing anomalies.
Each team is right, but none of them are complete.
Because traditional visibility tools show metrics — not timelines.
They show where you ended up, not how you drifted.
The Hidden Cost of Drift
Drift isn't just a configuration issue — it's a visibility gap.
When systems drift away from their desired state, every layer of your cloud starts lying — gently, silently.
Your monitoring says uptime is fine.
Your CI/CD says deployment succeeded.
Your security tools say no major vulnerabilities detected.
But beneath the surface, your infrastructure has changed.
A single permission tweak can open an exposure window.
A small network route adjustment can cascade into latency.
A storage class change can multiply costs overnight.
By the time someone connects the dots, you're already in incident mode.
That's not a technical problem — it's a storytelling problem.
The Need for a Cloud Time Machine
Imagine if you could scroll back in time and see your infrastructure as it was before things broke.
Not just through logs or commit histories — but visually.
That's exactly why Cloudshot built Drift Replay.
It's not another dashboard.
It's a time machine for your cloud.
How Drift Replay Works
Cloudshot continuously tracks every configuration change across AWS, Azure, and GCP — mapping resources, dependencies, and drifts in real time.
When something breaks, you can rewind your environment like a timeline and see what changed, when it changed, and who triggered it.
Cross-Cloud Replay
View changes across all your cloud accounts in one timeline — no switching consoles.
Visual Drift Comparison
See before/after snapshots of your cloud infrastructure — down to IAM, routes, or instance state.
Root Cause Clarity
Pinpoint the first configuration change that triggered cascading effects.
Audit-Ready History
Every change comes timestamped and attributed for compliance traceability.
It's the first system that doesn't just alert you to drift — it lets you see it unfold.
Real-World Impact
Fintech Company
Running multi-cloud workloads
A fintech company running multi-cloud workloads once faced a recurring incident: random cost surges and intermittent API timeouts every few weeks.
Each time, different teams blamed different causes — scaling policies, IAM rules, or shadow workloads.
The Discovery:
After integrating Cloudshot, they used Drift Replay to visualize the timeline of each event.
They discovered that every spike traced back to an automated test environment that wasn't cleaned up — a "temporary" setup promoted into production.
The Fix:
Once they could see the drift pattern, it took minutes to fix what had previously taken days to debate.
The result:
Incident resolution time dropped by 70%.
The Power of Visual Context
When you can replay your cloud, postmortems stop being guesswork.
Root cause becomes visible, not theoretical.
Drift Replay brings truth in sequence — showing teams how the story actually unfolded, not how logs interpret it.
It's visibility redefined — from "What broke?" to "When did it start breaking?"
This is what modern CloudOps needs:
Not static snapshots, but living timelines.
Not just dashboards, but understanding.
The Takeaway
In the modern cloud, everything is temporary — including truth.
Dashboards tell you what's happening now.
Drift Replay shows you how you got here.
When teams can visually rewind and understand drift, they stop reacting to incidents — and start preventing them.
Cloudshot Drift Replay doesn't just track change.
It gives you back the story of your cloud.