HACKER Q&A
📣 orkunk

How do you detect configuration drift between environments?


Hi HN,

I’m curious how teams detect configuration drift between environments like prod, staging, and test.

In several projects I worked on, incidents were often caused by unnoticed config differences between environments. Usually someone changed a config, a deployment happened later, and the difference went unnoticed until something broke.

Most tools I found focus on file diff, but not on monitoring drift over time.

Because of that, I started building a small tool around this idea:

- configuration is scanned from a Git repository - a baseline run defines the expected state - scheduled scans compare configs against that baseline - drift opens a finding - alerts can be delivered to Slack or Jira

Manual runs are mainly for inspection. Scheduled runs are intended for monitoring.

Typical examples include: - .NET appsettings.json - IIS / web.config - environment-specific configs across multiple environments

I’d love to hear how others currently solve this problem in practice.

Live: https://gatewaylabs.net


  👤 orkunk Accepted Answer ✓
I’m especially interested in real-world approaches for multi-environment deployments, not just file diff tooling.