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Overview

Annie maintains a temporal record of your entire infrastructure, enabling you to ask questions about the state of any resource at any point in time. This “time travel” capability is essential for:
  • Incident Investigation: “What changed before the outage?”
  • Change Validation: “Did my Terraform apply work correctly?”
  • Compliance & Auditing: “When was this security group modified?”
  • Rollback Analysis: “What was the previous configuration?”
Default History: 3 DaysAnnie keeps 3 days of infrastructure history by default. Longer history depends on your plan. Queries are limited to the recorded data available in your project.

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What You Can Ask Annie

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Track Recent Changes

Ask Annie what changed in your infrastructure:
  • “What changed in production in the last 24 hours?”
  • “Show me infrastructure changes from yesterday”
  • “What was modified in AWS in the last 3 days?”
  • “List all security group changes since yesterday”
  • “Show me the history of this RDS instance”
  • “What happened to my prod-database in the last 3 days?”
  • “When was this security group last modified?”
  • “Who changed the IAM role permissions?”
  • “What did our production VPC look like yesterday at 2pm?”
  • “Show me the security group rules before the incident”
  • “What resources existed in staging yesterday?”

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Real-World Examples

Production database experiencing connection issues starting at 2:00 PM.“What changed in production between 1pm and 3pm today?”
I found 3 changes in that window:
  • 1:45 PM: Security group sg-prod-db was modified - an inbound rule for subnet 10.0.1.0/24 was removed
  • 1:52 PM: The prod-api service lost connectivity to the database
  • 2:00 PM: PagerDuty alert fired
Root cause: The security group change at 1:45 PM removed access from the application subnet.
Auditor asks when encryption settings were changed on a sensitive S3 bucket.“Show me the history of the sensitive-data-bucket”
Here’s the change history for sensitive-data-bucket:
  • Two days ago: Bucket created with SSE-S3 encryption
  • Yesterday: Encryption changed to SSE-KMS with key arn:aws:kms:…
  • Today: Key rotation policy enabled
The recorded history shows encryption enabled throughout this period.
You just ran terraform apply and want to verify the changes.“What changed in the last 30 minutes?”
I found 5 resources updated in the last 30 minutes:
  • EC2 instance prod-api-1: instance type changed from t3.medium to t3.large
  • EC2 instance prod-api-2: instance type changed from t3.medium to t3.large
  • Auto Scaling Group prod-api-asg: desired capacity changed from 2 to 4
  • Target Group prod-api-tg: 2 new targets registered
  • CloudWatch Alarm prod-api-cpu: threshold changed from 70% to 80%
All changes match your Terraform configuration.
You suspect someone made manual changes in the AWS console.“What resources were modified outside of Terraform in the last 3 days?”
I found 2 resources with manual changes not in your Terraform code:
  • Security group sg-dev-debug: Port 22 opened to 0.0.0.0/0 via AWS console yesterday
  • IAM role dev-admin-role: New policy attached manually today
Would you like me to show you the specific changes?
See Drift Detection for more on finding the gap between declared and actual infrastructure.

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Best Practices

Start with the Incident Time

When investigating issues, ask about changes around the time symptoms first appeared.

Narrow to Specific Resources

If you know which resource is problematic, ask about its specific history.

Compare Before and After

Ask Annie to show you what a resource looked like before a specific event.

Track Terraform vs Manual

Ask Annie to identify changes made outside of your Infrastructure as Code.

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Get Started

Create Account

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See Time Travel in action