Keep your catalogs, lose the maintenance

How can teams reach alignment on ever-changing standards for production readiness? In this blog, we summarize our January 2024 interview with Alina Anderson from Outreach.io, during which we discuss how her team uses Cortex’s scorecarding to coordinate production readiness standards across stakeholders. This article offers actionable guidance for DevOps Engineers, SREs, and managers seeking to achieve more reliable services by streamlining production readiness processes while maintaining a culture of continuous improvement.

Teams often try Backstage when they have aspirations of “building anything and everything,” but run into problems when supporting “anything and everything.” If disappointing developer adoption rates, lackluster reporting, and never-ending maintenance sounds familiar, Cortex offers a solution for migrating off Backstage without losing the hard work you’ve put into catalogs and plugins.

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Leaders at every level need a clear view of the organization to invest resources wisely, and teams need to be able to track their progress against organizational goals. However, collecting and presenting metrics manually is unscalable, and building dashboards and reporting from scratch is labor intensive. Read on to learn how Cortex's out of the box reporting can be extended to fit any information use case.