# Tracking Changes in Cloud Architecture

One of the less obvious but most powerful features of Hava is the Version history.

Cloud environments are rarely static. Autoscaling will add and remove instances, load balancers might reconfigure, security groups and rules could be refined.

The nature of cloud environments gives us a huge amount of flexibility in the way we configure and deploy solutions.

With new services, options and attributes being added all the time, keeping your environment diagrams up to date and your stakeholders informed of the current 'state of play' can be time consuming and costly if tackled manually.

Of course when things go wrong, knowing what has changed within your cloud environment gives you the ability to quickly identify and resolve the issue. This can be a massive time and cost saving strategy for mission critical environments.

Once you connect your cloud account to Hava, your cloud resources are polled continuously and when changes are detected your current diagram is updated to reflect the change and the previous diagram is archived into the "Versions" tab

![Version History](/files/kTMVzneSowUmOJVk6LXI)

To view previous versions of your cloud infrastructure, open up your infrastructure diagram, navigate to the "Versions" tab on the right hand side.

This will display a list of the previous state changes.

The date of each version indicates when the revision diagram was created due to a state change.

The Compare Revisions feature allows you to compare any two diagrams.

This can be the current state vs a previous diagram, or any other two historical versions.

<figure><img src="/files/hVpBQo42tiX5gbCwCdIJ" alt=""><figcaption><p>Hava Diff Diagram</p></figcaption></figure>

Run a programmatic comparison at a granular level you can export the JSON data from both diagrams.

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## FAQ's

**How long do you keep versions?**

The amount of versions in your list can vary depending on how often your architecture is amended and synchronised.  The Teams retains versions for 6 months.

You can extend data retention by adding additional retention months to your plan.

**How often do you import new versions?**

Your sources will sync every 24 hours. You can manually sync if you have just made configuration changes that you want to see right away or you can trigger a sync in your CI/CD pipelines using the Hava API or CLI.

**Can I compare my versions within Hava?**

Yes - use the Compare Revisions tool.

**Can I be notified when changes trigger a new diagram revision?**

Yes - you can set up Architectural Monitoring Alerts that will email you a diff diagram as new revisions are created. This shows you exactly what just changed.


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