The Roadie API is now live and scorecards have come to the Catalog

The latest features and updates from Roadie.

🤖 The Roadie API is now live for all users on our Growth Plan.

It includes:

1. The Backstage catalog API exposed, via token authentication for Roadie customers.
2. A scaffolder API for testing templates in continuous integration (via dry-run), triggering templates, and listing historical scaffolder runs.
3. A **Tech Insights API** that allows you to create, read, update and delete scorecards, checks and data sources.

At the moment API token generation is limited to Admins. If you are an Admin and need a token, simply navigate to Administration (bottom of the sidebar) and Account (in the tabs across the top). Give your token a name and click Generate Token.

🎨 More Decorators: you can now set owners and other properties in the Roadie UI (no yaml required)

We’ve expanded Decorators to allow setting many more fields on the Entities in your catalog.

• You can now override the owner, lifecycle and tags of Components right in the Roadie UI.
• Groups and all other Entity Kinds have also been expanded so that more properties can be set.

All without yaml. Just use the Decorate Entity feature in the top left corner of each Component page. Simple.

💯 Scorecards in the Catalog

How to surface scorecard information to teams is something we think a lot about at Roadie. A few months ago we added Rollups to help. This month we launched Scorecards in the Catalog to increase visibility and discoverability for teams. This is something with a long history (the original discussion in the Backstage community was way back in September 2020) and it’s something we’re hyped about.

🙅‍♂️ Tech Insights gets exclusions (in beta) and a new Facts list

We’re currently beta testing the ability to exclude entities from a Tech Insights scorecard and a check. This will give fine-grain control over the checks and scorecards you can create and pinpoint areas of your catalog.

We’ve also added a Facts list under the Data tab in Tech Insights to improve discovery of what you can and can’t do with Tech Insights data sources.

⏫ Upgrade to Backstage 1.21

We’ve upgraded Backstage to 1.21 for all customers. The biggest change since the last update at the end of 2023 is the new scaffolder UI with horizontal paging.

The upgrade to 1.21 also fixes a small but annoying bug that was pointed out by some customers: the scroll position of TechDocs pages now returns to the top when you navigate between different docs.

Our next version bump will be to 1.23 when that lands (hopefully later this month).

🔌 Plugin roundup

• The new PagerDuty plugin is now supported. PagerDuty took over support for the plugin in January, deprecated the old plugin and launched their own version. It’s nice. We like it.
• The Pulumi plugin is now supported. With it, you can bring infrastructure data associated with your Pulumi stack into Backstage.
• The Cost Insights plugin now has beta support. If you’re interested reach out to one of the Roadie team on Slack, Discord or Teams.