Inventory
What Alien records when it observes existing environments.
Operate inventory is a read-only snapshot of resources that already exist in a customer environment.
Kubernetes
The Operator runs inside the customer's cluster and reports selected workloads:
- Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Jobs, and Pods
- replica counts and rollout status
- container images and versions
- CPU and memory samples when metrics are available
- last heartbeat and connectivity state
The selector comes from setup: namespace, workload names, labels, or a combination. Alien only reports resources that match.
AWS, GCP, and Azure
For cloud-only environments, Alien uses read-only inventory APIs scoped to the customer's boundary:
- AWS: a dedicated account
- GCP: a project
- Azure: a resource group
Inventory includes provider-native identity, resource type, location, tags or labels, and health signals where the provider exposes them.
Alien-Created Resources
If Alien also built part of the environment, inventory can link the raw provider resource to the Alien resource that created it. The raw record is still inventory. Build state remains separate from Operate inventory.
Freshness
Inventory is replace-latest. Dashboards should treat stale inventory as a freshness problem first, not proof that the resource is unhealthy.