Announcing DX Service Cloud: offering software catalogs, scorecards, and self-service
Tyler Wray
Product lead
Today, we’re announcing a new product from DX: Service Cloud.
Service Cloud is the latest addition to the DX platform, providing organizations visibility into service ownership and health. With software catalogs and scorecards—interoperable with Spotify Backstage—Service Cloud helps create a single source of truth for ensuring reliability and quality standards are met.
Leading tech companies like Block and Pinterest, and enterprises like Pfizer and Vanguard, use DX to measure, understand and improve developer productivity. With the addition of Service Cloud, customers can get intelligence into people, teams, and now systems—all in one place.
Why Service Cloud?
We built Service Cloud to address a need we saw in the market. Until today, organizations looking for similar capabilities as Service Cloud have had two main options:
1. Building using Spotify Backstage. Backstage’s flexibility allows for building powerful developer platforms. But for many, building a platform with a multitude of features isn’t the immediate goal. Rather, what’s first needed is a software catalog—with tracking of ownership, dependencies, and APIs—along with reporting. For this, building from scratch with Backstage can be time consuming and expensive.
2. Making a risky all-in SaaS investment. In the wake of Backstage’s popularity, several SaaS solutions have popped up. But all too often, customers experience steep pricing, low adoption, and lackluster payoff. In fact, our data shows that nearly two out of three customers have or plan to churn from these tools, or are questioning their return on investment.
In a perfect world, there would be a middle path between these two extremes: a solution designed for companies either looking to accelerate their Backstage journey through a partner, or companies that want a standalone no-frills IDP that they can get started with, without vendor lock-in.
This is where DX comes in. With Service Cloud, customers get a solution that is:
- Reasonably priced and low-risk.
- Can be used either standalone or integrated into developer platforms like Backstage—avoiding vendor lock-in.
- Fast to stand up, but flexible enough to support large companies.
Best of all, Service Cloud is baked into the DX developer intelligence platform. This means that customers get a single solution for intelligence across developer productivity and service health, avoiding the need to stand up separate tools.
How it works
Software catalog
Whether you’re building a catalog from scratch, or have an existing catalog, DX allows you to quickly centralize all your software data in one place. Define custom data models and relationships to reflect the information you want to track. Then use our APIs and data connectors to unify data within DX.
Creating an accurate service catalog helps eliminate costly knowledge gaps and technical blind spots with a centralized view of all services, their owners, and relationships. Just as importantly, it serves as a foundation for scorecards and reporting.
Scorecards
Whether for tracking production readiness, software migrations, or other initiatives focused on driving engineering excellence, scorecards provide critical tracking needed to drive change. DX scorecards can be levels-based (e.g., Gold, Silver, Bronze) or points-based with weighted scoring.
Other scorecards solutions rely on custom query languages or JSON logic, limiting what can be achieved. In contrast, in DX, scorecards are powered by SQL, providing the most flexible and performant engine for defining and measuring software standards.
Initiatives
Reporting is one thing—driving action is another. With our Initiatives feature, you can quickly convert scorecards into structured execution plans with action items and timelines.
Initiatives also trigger automatic Slack notifications that are sent directly to service owners and teams, keeping them aware of tasks that need attention. In addition, the DX integration with Jira and Linear allows streamlined issue creation and bidirectional tracking.
Backstage integration
Service Cloud can be used standalone or integrated with existing IDPs like Backstage. For example, Pinterest—who built a homegrown developer portal with Backstage—uses DX as a clearing house for catalog metadata and to build scorecards for tracking service health and reliability standards.
If you’re just starting your Backstage journey, DX can help fast-track your development. For example, building and maintaining a catalog can be difficult. DX manages difficult parts like linking service data to your org chart and other tools, acting as an entity provider for Backstage.
If you already have a catalog fully built, use DX to embed metrics and insights into your IDP—DX ingests data from over 40 different development tools and unifies it with your catalog, helping you quickly enhance your developer portal with data-driven features.
Get started today
Today’s announcement reflects only the start of what Service Cloud has to offer. In the near future, we will add deeper integrations with Spotify Backstage, flexible automation and self-service workflows, the ability to correlate service health to developer productivity signals, and instant insights powered by DX AI.
Service Cloud is available for free trial for new and existing DX customers. To learn more about Service Cloud, or to set up a free trial, please see more information on our website or request a live demo.