Tech Insights: read-only for the org, PagerDuty and manually curated data sources, better Catalog metadata, UX improvements

In close collaboration with design partners, we’ve pushed a sprint dedicated to expanding the use cases of Tech Insights so it delivers value to more developers on a day-to-day basis. For example, it’s now possible to share ready-only Scorecards/Checks/Data Sources to your org, but only Roadie admins can modify them. Furthermore, Tech Insight now supports using PagerDuty and manually curated entries as data sources. You can also drive the quality of your Catalog metadata up with our extensive entity checks. We also made several UX improvements to the product.

Open up Tech Insights for the rest of your teams

Once you’ve set up your Tech Insights checks and Scorecards, you probably still want dev teams to know how their services are doing. That’s when having read-only Tech Insights come in handy: you can now decide whether Tech Insight is visible to anyone or just the Roadie Admin group.

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This feature is available to customers who have purchased Tech Insights addon. To start using this feature, head to /administration/settings/tech-insights and check the corresponding checkboxes.

Bring PagerDuty service info and analytics to your Scorecards

If you use PagerDuty, it might be interesting to review how your services are performing in terms of incident management. You can now create checks against PagerDuty Service information, such as whether a service has escalation policies or support hours set up. Additionally, you can create checks against PagerDuty Analytics, such as mean seconds to resolve or total business hours interruptions.

Screenshot: PagerDuty Backstage scorecards

This feature is only available to customers who have purchased Tech Insights addon. To start using PagerDuty checks, go to /tech-insights/checks/add

Support for Manually Curated data sources

Let’s say you want to check if critical services have completed their corresponding pentesting assessment within the expected timeframe. This process is usually done by a third-party vendor, perhaps once a year or so, which means there’s little chance for it to be found in a Cloud service or logged in by developers. In these cases, it is convenient to check manually curated sources like an entries file.

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This feature is available to customers who have purchased Tech Insights addon. For more information on setting up Manually Curated data sources, check out our beta guide.

Achieve better Catalog metadata

You now have more options to check if the metadata in your entities is correct, and you can enforce that certain labels are set in the corresponding YAML file. We’ve added several facts to the built-in entity metadata, such as GitHub project slug, tags, or annotation keys. Plus, you can combine these facts with operators that let you clearly define expectations for your component’s entries.

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This feature is available to customers who have purchased Tech Insights addon. Check out this video tutorial by David to learn more.

UX Improvements

We continue to improve the UX of Tech Insights. For example, we fixed how empty values from certain Data Sources are presented.