Skip to main content

Cloud Engineers Quick Start

Use this guide to start using Cloudaware as a cloud engineer, platform engineer, or SRE. It focuses on connecting cloud and infrastructure sources, keeping discovery reliable, improving metadata quality, and giving downstream teams trusted CMDB context.

Before You Start​

Confirm that you have:

  • Access to a Cloudaware account and the integrations you will configure.
  • Permission to create or assign cloud roles, policies, service principals, service accounts, keys, or API tokens.
  • A list of in-scope accounts, subscriptions, projects, tenancies, clusters, regions, and services.
  • Agreement on least-privilege access with cloud, security, and platform owners.
  • Required ownership metadata, such as application, environment, owner, service, business unit, or cost center tags.
  • A validation plan for the first discovery cycle.

Understand The Inventory Layer​

Cloud engineers usually start in CMDB because inventory, relationships, tags, and configuration history support the rest of Cloudaware.

Start with:

Connect Cloud Providers​

Connect the providers that make up your first inventory scope. Start with read-only or least-privilege discovery access, then expand only when a module requires additional permissions.

Use the provider guide that matches your environment:

For each provider, review prerequisites, least-privilege access, setup, service coverage, resource coverage, verification, and troubleshooting before adding broad production scope.

Verify Discovery And Data Quality​

After onboarding, confirm that Cloudaware is collecting the expected resources and relationships.

Check:

  • Accounts, subscriptions, projects, tenancies, clusters, and regions are represented.
  • Key services and resource types appear in CMDB.
  • Relationships connect resources to networks, accounts, regions, applications, and owners where available.
  • Tags and labels are collected consistently.
  • Recently changed resources appear after the expected discovery interval.
  • Permission errors, throttling, skipped services, or stale records are visible and assigned.

Use CMDB Ingestion, CMDB Navigator, CMDB Search, List Views, and Queries during validation.

Improve Tagging And Ownership​

Tag and label quality determines how useful Cloudaware is for reporting, policy scoping, cost allocation, security triage, and automation. Start with a small required tag set, measure coverage, and remediate gaps with account owners.

Recommended sequence:

  1. Define required tags, such as Owner, Application, Environment, Cost Center, Business Unit, and Data Classification.
  2. Use Cloudaware Tag Analyzer to measure coverage.
  3. Use Enrichment Rules to normalize metadata where source tags are inconsistent.
  4. Use Cloudaware Virtual Applications to group related resources into application or service views.
  5. Publish CMDB views that show missing or invalid metadata by owner and environment.

Segment Environments​

Create practical scopes so administrators, security teams, FinOps users, and application owners can filter data without rebuilding the same queries.

Common scopes include:

  • Production, non-production, sandbox, and shared services.
  • Business unit, customer, application, product, or platform team.
  • Cloud provider, region, account, subscription, project, tenancy, cluster, or vCenter.
  • Criticality, exposure, compliance boundary, or data classification.

Use Scoping, CMDB List Views, Queries & Reporting, and Virtual Applications to make these segments reusable.

Add Operational Signals​

Once baseline discovery is reliable, connect the operational systems that help teams act on CMDB context.

Use:

Automate Repeatable Onboarding​

For large estates, avoid one-off integration changes. Standardize account onboarding, metadata checks, and validation steps.

Use the guides on:

Next Steps​

  • Use CMDB Playbooks for inventory baseline and data quality workflows.
  • Use Troubleshooting sections in relevant cloud provider guides in Integrations and the general Troubleshooting for permission, freshness, and connectivity issues.
  • Coordinate with FinOps through the Cloud FinOps Quick Start when billing and allocation depend on inventory quality.