Changes

When you save a config item to Config DB, it tracks its changes. These changes come from external sources like Kubernetes events or Azure activities. Alternatively, Mission Control can automatically detect changes by comparing the old config with the new one.

Changes are of two types:

• Diff change
• Event based change

Diff Change

Config DB generates these changes by comparing the old and new config values. The image below shows a change where the port value was modified from 8080 to 3000.

Event based change

External sources like Kubernetes Events and AWS CloudTrail provide these changes. Event-based changes have an associated type.

See Transformation Changes.

Extracting Changes

Custom scrapers can ingest changes from external systems when you enable the full option. This separates config data from change events in your source.

When full: true is set, the scraper expects each config item to have these top-level fields:

• config - The actual configuration data to store
• changes - An array of change events
• access_logs - Access log entries (see Access Logs)

note

Fields other than these are ignored. Missing fields are treated as empty.

Example

Consider a file containing:

fixtures/data/car.json
{
  "reg_no": "A123",
  "config": {
    "meta": "this is the actual config that'll be stored."
  },
  "changes": [
    {
      "change_type": "drive",
      "summary": "car color changed to blue",
      "created_at": "2025-01-01T10:00:00Z"
    }
  ],
  "access_logs": [
    {
      "external_user_id": "user-123",
      "created_at": "2025-01-01"
    }
  ]
}

With full: true:

apiVersion: configs.flanksource.com/v1
kind: ScrapeConfig
metadata:
  name: file-scraper
spec:
  full: true
  file:
    - type: Car
      id: $.reg_no
      paths:
        - fixtures/data/car.json

The scraper stores only the config object:

{
  "meta": "this is the actual config that'll be stored."
}

And records the change event separately on that config item.

Change Schema

Field	Description	Scheme
change_type	Type of the change	string
action	Action of the change	delete or ignore
summary	Summary of the change	string
severity	Severity of the change	string
source	Source of the change	string
created_at	Creation time of the change	time.Time
created_by	User who created the change	string
external_change_id	ID of the change in the external system	string
external_id	ID of the change	string
details	Additional details	map[string]any
diff	Diff of the change	string
patches	Patches of the change	string