One of PowerShell's greatest strengths is its ability to glue pretty much any technologies together. We'll use that strength to pull data from a number of services, connecting the resulting dots with a graph database that could be used as a lightweight CMDB. We'll talk about: * Different interfaces PowerShell can use, from modules to .NET libraries * Graph databases like Neo4j, and how these can be useful for sysadmins * A practical (janky) CMDB, and why these can be useful ## Why the topic: I'm a fan of CMDBs that have useful data. They can drive automation, monitoring and alerting, reporting, and anything else that benefits from visibility. It just so happens that: * This is a great way to illustrate the various ways to talk to things in PowerShell (modules, web APIs, .NET libraries, binaries, etc.) * Graph databases are awesome, and map to real life systems more easily than the cumbersome fun of primary keys, foreign keys, and strict schemas * Neo4j has a free, cross platform community edition, and there's a simple PowerShell module to work with it * We can instill other important lessons, e.g. modules/abstraction, community/sharing * We can provide a practical example that folks without a reasonable CMDB could borrow and extend * Heavy weight, expensive, actual CMDBs are a poor fit for shops adopting DevOps practices and principles