Introducing software catalogs, scorecards, and self-service
Tyler Wray
Product lead
Today, we’re announcing a new product suite from DX: Service Cloud.
With software catalogs, scorecards, and self-service workflows—all interoperable with Spotify Backstage—Service Cloud helps organizations track ownership, ensure standards, and automate developer workflows.
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 manage their 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 to 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. Investing in a standalone SaaS IDP. In the wake of Backstage’s popularity, several internal developer portal (IDP) offerings have popped up. But our research shows that customers face steep pricing, low adoption, and questionable payoff, with nearly two out of three customers planning to churn from these tools, or questioning their ROI.
DX Service Cloud provides a much-needed middle path: a solution that can both accelerate your Backstage journey, and serve as your standalone IDP if preferred. This flexibility means that DX can support your developer platform vision without creating vendor lock-in.
Best of all, Service Cloud is fully integrated with DX’s intelligence platform and data lake, which enables catalogs and scorecards that are enriched with qualitative and quantitative metrics. In addition, adoption can be more easily achieved thanks to DX’s already-high developer engagement rates.
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.