Catalog everything in your software ecosystem

This week marks our biggest launch yet. OpsLevel users can now catalog everything that's in production and map higher-order groupings within their software architecture—beyond services, repositories, and integrations—making OpsLevel a natural homepage for developers and a valuable resource right through to leadership.

The reality is, our customers rarely view each service or resource in a silo. Sometimes they’re focused on systems (collections of services and software objects that cooperate to create specific user experiences) or domains (collections of systems that support the same area of the business). Other times, they need to go one step deeper and understand each infrastructure resource a service runs on. All of these relationships may exist conceptually, but in OpsLevel they’re now the tangible foundation of our catalog and can provide valuable information to drive cross-functional business impacts. 

We introduced systems, domains, and infrastructure to OpsLevel, so customers can model their complete production environment—no matter how distributed your cloud provider is. Developers can make more informed decisions and troubleshoot faster, knowing how each individual service they change impacts a broader system, and engineering leaders can get the context they need across the organization (like the total footprint of a given business unit) at a glance.

“For OpsLevel users, it’s really about separating the forest from the trees. A list of services is very detailed, but that granularity can be overwhelming if you’re trying to answer higher-level questions about your production environment. Similarly, service-level metadata doesn’t always provide the depth of granularity a developer needs to solve a problem right now. As a true software catalog, our customers can accurately model their architecture and hone in at the right level of abstraction.”
– Ken Rose, CTO and Co-Founder

Why do systems, domains, and infra matter? 

Systems unblock product developers and platform operators

Systems are designed to provide broader relational context for those who work at the service and infrastructure level. Beyond adding a new container model, this is the go-to place for these individuals and teams to understand the current status of the objects they manage, and easily determine things like: 

• How many of my services are currently failing checks? Have my services dropped a tier? 
• Do my services have any campaigns that are currently failing? 
• Are any of my services currently experiencing an incident or alert? 
• Where are all of the API docs that make up my system? 

Domains provide relevant reporting for leadership teams

Meanwhile, domains open the door to valuable new reporting capabilities for leadership. After all, VPs and CTOs aren’t focused on whether specific checks are passing for a given service—they care about how the wider systems and domains they’re responsible for are performing so they can answer questions like:

• What is the overall footprint of the domain(s) I oversee? 
• How are performance metrics trending?
• What does overall health look like in my business area? 

By providing aggregate information about footprint and performance, OpsLevel becomes an engineering leader’s first point of reference for their business area and proves that an IDP can be a valuable hub for everyone within an engineering org. 

Our AWS integration centralizes all of your infra resources into one catalog  

By pulling infrastructure resources from across all of your AWS accounts into the OpsLevel catalog, customers gain a central point of reference for all of their AWS resources across multiple accounts and regions. 

Within this catalog view, users can gain complete context into which services and systems are built on which infra resources. This big picture view into their software ecosystem empowers users to troubleshoot faster and understand the relationships between various catalog entities. 

We’re starting with the most common resources and resource types:

• Databases (RDS, DynamoDB)
• Serverless (Lambda)
• Cache (Elasticache)
• Compute (EC2)
• Networking (VPC) 
• Queues/Message Brokers (SNS, SQS)
• Storage (S3)

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How does this show up in OpsLevel? 

We mentioned that this launch expands OpsLevel into a full software catalog—and that’s exactly what you’ll see reflected in the OpsLevel app. Where you used to navigate to a “Services List”, you’ll now find a “Catalog” overview, with varying depths of software objects embedded therein including “Services”, “Systems”, and “Domains”. Infra will be added later this month, with a separate announcement.

At the top of the “Systems” and “Domains” pages, you’ll find all of the roll-up metrics available at that level of depth. For instance, navigate to the “Domains” overview, and find a summary of how many systems, services, teams, and groups fall under a given domain, plus how these systems and domains are performing at a glance. 

Start using the full software catalog

The next time you log into OpsLevel, you’ll see the new catalog structure complete with systems, domains, and infra. Run a new campaign to pull in these higher-order groupings, and give your engineering teams and leaders several more layers of valuable context. Explore all of the ways you can set up systems and domains in our docs, or learn more about this new software catalog here.

Not a customer yet? Sign up for a free trial to see how our software catalog can free up your developers to ship quality software, faster. 

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