Additional HCP Terraform Features

Welcome back. We’re near the end of our HCP Terraform coverage. This article reviews several additional workspace features you should understand at a high level. The exam expects you to describe what these features do, why they exist, and when to use them — not deep implementation details. The goal here is clarity and familiarity.

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Health assessments

Terraform applies your declared desired state, then stops — it does not continuously observe real infrastructure. If someone manually changes resources (for example, resizing a VM in the cloud console), the real environment diverges from Terraform’s state: this is drift. Without ongoing checks, drift can remain undetected until someone runs terraform plan again. HCP Terraform Health Assessments run periodic checks (roughly every 24 hours) against a workspace’s real infrastructure and its state file, and they include two distinct checks:

• Drift detection — compares actual resources against the workspace state file to surface resources changed outside Terraform.
• Continuous validation — evaluates check blocks, preconditions, or postconditions in your Terraform configuration (for example, ensuring an SSL certificate isn’t expired or that an API endpoint returns a healthy status). Continuous validation monitors your custom rules between applies.

Lifecycle overview:

• Provision infrastructure with a workspace apply (e.g., terraform apply from a run).
• HCP Terraform performs periodic health assessments (drift detection and continuous validation).
• If an assessment detects an issue, HCP Terraform updates the workspace health status and sends notifications per your workspace notification settings (Slack, email, webhooks, etc.).
• The team remediates by reapplying the Terraform configuration or updating the configuration if the change was intentional.
• The assessment cycle continues.

Practical details:

• Workspaces show a health warning on the workspace page if they detect drift or failed checks, providing quick visibility.
• Health assessments are available in HCP Terraform Standard and Premium editions (paid feature).
• You can enable assessments per workspace or enforce them across the organization from org settings; org-level enforcement overrides workspace-level settings.

To enable health assessments, open the workspace UI Health settings and toggle the option; once saved, HCP Terraform begins periodic assessments automatically. Quick feature comparison

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Run triggers

Workspaces frequently depend on outputs from other workspaces. For example, a networking workspace may export subnet IDs; a firewall workspace consumes that list to create rules. If the networking workspace adds subnets, the firewall workspace must run again to create or update rules. Without automation, teams must manually trigger downstream runs — a fragile pattern at scale. Run triggers solve this by automatically queuing downstream workspace runs when one or more configured source (upstream) workspaces successfully complete an apply. In the subnet example, when the networking workspace finishes a successful apply, HCP Terraform enqueues a run in the firewall workspace so the firewall can reconcile rules based on the new subnets. Key points about run triggers:

• A downstream workspace can connect to up to 20 source (upstream) workspaces.
• When a source workspace completes a successful apply, HCP Terraform queues a run in the connected downstream workspaces.
• Run triggers only fire on successful applies — they do not trigger for failed applies or plan-only runs.
• You can optionally enable auto-apply for runs created by triggers (this setting is separate from the workspace’s main auto-apply toggle).

Configure run triggers from the downstream workspace: go to Settings → Run Triggers, connect one or more source workspaces, and optionally enable the trigger-specific auto-apply toggle. Once configured, dependent changes flow through your workspace pipeline automatically and reliably. Run triggers — concise checklist

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Tracking work with change requests

At scale, organizations may have hundreds of workspaces that require periodic attention: Terraform version upgrades, provider updates, drift remediation, or general maintenance. HCP Terraform provides change requests (lightweight to-do items) you can attach to specific workspaces to track and assign this work. Change requests are actionable notes tied to individual workspaces (think sticky notes or lightweight tickets). Key behaviors:

• Create a change request from a workspace or from the organization-level Explorer.
• Include a subject and message (Markdown supported).
• When targeting multiple workspaces, each workspace receives its own copy of the change request so teams can resolve and archive them independently.
• Teams can be notified when change requests are created on their workspaces.

Creating change requests from the Explorer The Explorer provides organization-level visibility so you can find work that needs attention across modules, providers, workspaces, and Terraform versions. Use filters and pre-built views (for example, workspaces using older Terraform versions, or workspaces with failed checks) to identify targets, then create change requests directly from the Explorer to keep context while assigning work. Change request fields

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Summary

These HCP Terraform features help teams manage infrastructure at scale by improving visibility, enforcing correctness, and automating coordination:

• Health assessments — continuous drift detection and custom validation between runs.
• Run triggers — automatically coordinate downstream workspace runs after a successful apply.
• Change requests — attach and track actionable to-dos on workspaces.
• Explorer — organization-level visibility and a launching point for change requests.

Study the behavior and use cases for each feature (what it does, why it exists, and when to apply it) to prepare for conceptual questions on the Terraform Associate exam. For more information, see the HCP Terraform and Terraform Cloud documentation and the Terraform Associate Certification resources:

• Terraform Cloud & HCP Documentation
• Terraform Associate Certification: HashiCorp Certified

That’s the end of our HCP Terraform feature coverage for this lesson. Nice work making it through.