CloudFormation

Manage and inspect AWS CloudFormation stacks, resources, and drift

AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code service that lets you model, provision, and manage AWS resources by treating infrastructure as code. CloudFormation uses templates to describe the resources you need and their dependencies, so you can launch and configure them together as a stack.

With the CloudFormation integration, you can:

  • Describe Stacks: List all stacks in a region or get detailed information about a specific stack, including its status, outputs, tags, and drift information
  • List Stack Resources: Enumerate every resource in a stack with its logical ID, physical ID, type, status, and drift status
  • Describe Stack Events: View the full event history for a stack to understand what happened during create, update, or delete operations
  • Detect Stack Drift: Initiate drift detection to check whether any resources in a stack have been modified outside of CloudFormation
  • Drift Detection Status: Poll the results of a drift detection operation to see which resources have drifted and how many
  • Get Template: Retrieve the original template body (JSON or YAML) used to create or update a stack
  • Validate Template: Check a CloudFormation template for syntax errors, required capabilities, parameters, and declared transforms before deploying

In Sim, the CloudFormation integration enables your agents to monitor infrastructure state, detect configuration drift, audit stack resources, and validate templates as part of automated SRE and DevOps workflows. This is especially powerful when combined with CloudWatch for observability and SNS for alerting, creating end-to-end infrastructure monitoring pipelines.

Usage Instructions

Integrate AWS CloudFormation into workflows. Describe stacks, list resources, detect drift, view stack events, retrieve templates, and validate templates. Requires AWS access key and secret access key.

Tools

cloudformation_describe_stacks

List and describe CloudFormation stacks

Input

ParameterTypeRequiredDescription
awsRegionstringYesAWS region (e.g., us-east-1)
awsAccessKeyIdstringYesAWS access key ID
awsSecretAccessKeystringYesAWS secret access key
stackNamestringNoStack name or ID to describe (omit to list all stacks)

Output

ParameterTypeDescription
stacksarrayList of CloudFormation stacks with status, outputs, and tags

cloudformation_list_stack_resources

List all resources in a CloudFormation stack

Input

ParameterTypeRequiredDescription
awsRegionstringYesAWS region (e.g., us-east-1)
awsAccessKeyIdstringYesAWS access key ID
awsSecretAccessKeystringYesAWS secret access key
stackNamestringYesStack name or ID

Output

ParameterTypeDescription
resourcesarrayList of stack resources with type, status, and drift information

cloudformation_detect_stack_drift

Initiate drift detection on a CloudFormation stack

Input

ParameterTypeRequiredDescription
awsRegionstringYesAWS region (e.g., us-east-1)
awsAccessKeyIdstringYesAWS access key ID
awsSecretAccessKeystringYesAWS secret access key
stackNamestringYesStack name or ID to detect drift on

Output

ParameterTypeDescription
stackDriftDetectionIdstringID to use with Describe Stack Drift Detection Status to check results

cloudformation_describe_stack_drift_detection_status

Check the status of a stack drift detection operation

Input

ParameterTypeRequiredDescription
awsRegionstringYesAWS region (e.g., us-east-1)
awsAccessKeyIdstringYesAWS access key ID
awsSecretAccessKeystringYesAWS secret access key
stackDriftDetectionIdstringYesThe drift detection ID returned by Detect Stack Drift

Output

ParameterTypeDescription
stackIdstringThe stack ID
stackDriftDetectionIdstringThe drift detection ID
stackDriftStatusstringDrift status (DRIFTED, IN_SYNC, NOT_CHECKED)
detectionStatusstringDetection status (DETECTION_IN_PROGRESS, DETECTION_COMPLETE, DETECTION_FAILED)
detectionStatusReasonstringReason if detection failed
driftedStackResourceCountnumberNumber of resources that have drifted
timestampnumberTimestamp of the detection

cloudformation_describe_stack_events

Get the event history for a CloudFormation stack

Input

ParameterTypeRequiredDescription
awsRegionstringYesAWS region (e.g., us-east-1)
awsAccessKeyIdstringYesAWS access key ID
awsSecretAccessKeystringYesAWS secret access key
stackNamestringYesStack name or ID
limitnumberNoMaximum number of events to return (default: 50)

Output

ParameterTypeDescription
eventsarrayList of stack events with resource status and timestamps

cloudformation_get_template

Retrieve the template body for a CloudFormation stack

Input

ParameterTypeRequiredDescription
awsRegionstringYesAWS region (e.g., us-east-1)
awsAccessKeyIdstringYesAWS access key ID
awsSecretAccessKeystringYesAWS secret access key
stackNamestringYesStack name or ID

Output

ParameterTypeDescription
templateBodystringThe template body as a JSON or YAML string
stagesAvailablearrayAvailable template stages

cloudformation_validate_template

Validate a CloudFormation template for syntax and structural correctness

Input

ParameterTypeRequiredDescription
awsRegionstringYesAWS region (e.g., us-east-1)
awsAccessKeyIdstringYesAWS access key ID
awsSecretAccessKeystringYesAWS secret access key
templateBodystringYesThe CloudFormation template body (JSON or YAML)

Output

ParameterTypeDescription
descriptionstringTemplate description
parametersarrayTemplate parameters with defaults and descriptions
capabilitiesarrayRequired capabilities (e.g., CAPABILITY_IAM)
capabilitiesReasonstringReason capabilities are required
declaredTransformsarrayTransforms used in the template (e.g., AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31)

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