Drift Scanner
Quickstart
Go from zero to a monitored PostgreSQL environment in five minutes. Register an account, add your first environment, configure alerts, and let scans run automatically.
This guide takes you from zero to a monitored PostgreSQL environment in about five minutes.
1. Create an account
Sign up at arcnull.com/register. You only need an email address and a password. Once you are in, head to your dashboard.
2. Subscribe to Drift Scanner
Drift Scanner has two tiers:
| Tier | Environments | Scan cadence | Manual scan rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 2 | Hourly cron (configurable) | 3 per minute |
| Pro | 10 | Hourly cron (configurable) | 10 per minute |
Free is enough to try the product against a single staging database. You can upgrade from the dashboard at any time.
3. Add your first environment
An environment is a single PostgreSQL database you want to monitor. From the dashboard, open Drift → Environments → New environment and paste a JDBC URL.
jdbc:postgresql://prod-db.example.com:5432/myapp
Provide a PostgreSQL username and password. We strongly recommend a read-only user — Drift Scanner only reads from pg_catalog and never issues DDL. A role with CONNECT on the database and USAGE on pg_catalog is enough.
SSRF restrictions. Your JDBC host cannot resolve to loopback, private network ranges, link-local addresses, IPv6 unique-local addresses, or cloud-provider metadata endpoints (
169.254.0.0/16,100.64.0.0/10). These checks run at registration and again on every scan as defense-in-depth.
Credentials are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM before being persisted.
4. Wait for the first snapshot
After you create the environment, Drift Scanner captures its first snapshot and stores it as the baseline. This typically takes under thirty seconds on a small database.
The snapshot includes:
- Tables and columns (including types, defaults, nullability)
- Indexes and constraints
- Sequences
- Views
- Functions
5. Configure alerts
Open the environment's Alerts tab and wire up at least one channel:
- Slack — paste an incoming webhook URL
- Custom webhook — we POST JSON to your endpoint
- Email — goes to the address on your account
See Alerts for the webhook payload shape and delivery guarantees.
6. You're done
Scans now run automatically on the cron schedule you configured (defaults to hourly: 0 0 * * * *). Each scan takes a new snapshot, diffs it against the baseline, and — if the diff has any changes — raises a drift event and fires your alerts.
From here:
- Understand what an environment is in Environments
- Learn how snapshots, diffs, and severity work in Scanning & drift detection
- Read the full API reference