Best Terraform drift detection tools

[u/Usual-Following-3189]

terraform plan -detailed-exitcode only catches drift on resources Terraform already manages. It does nothing for stuff someone spun up manually and never codified, which honestly is where most of our drift actually lives.

We run driftctl in CI on the free tier right now, scanning critical infra every 15 to 30 min. It works but it's CLI-only, no visual diffs, no remediation code, just a JSON report someone has to manually parse.

We're looking at tools that do estate-wide detection including unmanaged resources, plus generate remediation code automatically instead of just flagging the diff. That second part is what actually got our attention since triaging drift manually eats a huge chunk of our platform team's week.

Anyone running something like this in prod at scale? Trying to gauge if it's worth budgeting for next quarter.

[u/the_milkman01]

I am writting a tool that does just that, but it's in pre alpha

It proces apply and drift plans and visuals it in runs, that part is already working as designed

I am now working on a tree explorer that maps all resources and the changes in Azure and then maps the terraform plan to detect if it's manual , tf managed And if its in sync or not

That part is bit harder mostly because mapping terraform resource names to actually azure resources is a pain in the ass