Hands On System Design with "Distributed Systems Implementation - 254-Lesson’s curriculum"

Day 169: Building Configuration Management Database Integration from Logs

Core CMDB Concepts

A CMDB stores three types of information: Configuration Items (CIs), relationships, and attributes. CIs represent infrastructure components - servers, services, databases, load balancers. Relationships map dependencies - which service calls which API, which database backs which application.

Traditional CMDBs rely on manual updates or periodic discovery scans. Log-driven CMDBs achieve continuous real-time discovery by parsing structured logs. When your web service logs "Connected to postgres-prod-01", that single line creates two CIs (web service, database) and one relationship (dependency).