4. Teams
Teams serve as both a method representing your organization in Cortex and as owners for different entities in the catalogs. Teams offers a centralized place for the most important information about each group, making it easier for everyone to find what they need.
You can access Teams from the Catalogs tab in the main nav.
When you open the Teams page, you'll see Mine and All, which denote teams you belong to and all teams at your organization, respectively. The teams that appear under All will automatically display as a hierarchy, whereas those under Mine will be listed out.
Each team has its own details page, where you can access key details about the team. At the top, you’ll find on-call information, Slack channels, and parent and children teams.
In the Overview tab, you’ll find a high-level view of how the team is performing across Scorecards. By default, this will show the level that the team’s entities have reached in each Scorecard. Below the Scorecards section, you can find where the selected team belongs within the broader Hierarchy.
The Members tab includes a list of all team members, as well as their contact information. You can also add tags for each user to signify each member’s role on the team. When available, Cortex will also pull in profile photos from your Git provider.
Under Entities, you can find all of the entities that belong to the team. Above the search bar, there’s a note that indicates how many entities the team is directly responsible for.
The Links tab contains links to important resources for a team, including onboarding guides, best practices documents, and runbooks for current projects.
Leaderboard
The Leaderboard allows everyone to see the ten best performing teams within your organization. You can find the leaderboard on the Teams catalog page.
Cortex will average all Scorecard scores for each team to generate ranks by default, but you can use the dropdown to view the leaderboard based on specific Scorecards.
The leaderboard gamifies entity quality and encourages team members to achieve goals. This creates a culture of accountability, where everyone can see how they’re performing. Plus, it never hurts to inspire a bit of healthy competition between teams.
Ownership
Teams not only allow you to collect vital information in a single place, but are also crucial for ownership. Rather than assign an entity to individual team members, you can assign ownership to an entire team. This makes it easy to assign multiple team members to an entity, and it ensures that when a team’s composition changes, ownership is updated accordingly.
Creating a team
To create a team, select Create Team next to the search bar.
You have two options for creating a team — you can import a team from an identity provider, like Workday or OpsGenie, or you can Create team manually.
Import teams
If you have an existing source of truth for your teams and team members, we recommend importing teams. By integrating with your identity provider at this stage, Cortex will automatically sync team pages with your source of truth so you don't have to update information in more than one place when people join or leave teams.
To import teams at this stage, your integrations with those third parties must already be established. Any available identity providers will be available on this page.
Once you select the provider, a list of all teams available for import will appear below.
Next to each team, you can also see how many members belong to that team. Select a team to continue the import flow.
The Team name and Identifier will be filled in for you based on information from your identity provider. You can change the name and identifier before importing the team, but you cannot make changes to the identifier once the team is created. You can also add a Short description and/or a Full description, which supports markdown.
You can also add Slack channels to make it easier for people from other teams to contact you if they have questions. Selecting Add Slack channel will open a modal where you can select Slack channels through the Cortex integration.
You can also enable or disable Notifications at this stage. If notifications are enabled, team members will receive Slack messages when there are important updates to Scorecards, Initiatives, and more for entities that they own.
The Parents and Children sections allow you to structure your hierarchy.
Select teams for Parents if they oversee the team you’re creating. Any groups that the team oversees belong under Children. The teams that you choose at this point will automatically be reflected within the hierarchy in Cortex.
In the On call section, you can select the on-call service associated with that team. Under Links, you can also add links to important resources like dashboards, documentation, logs, and runbooks, as well as other key information that others should know about your team, like a Confluence space or a Jira project.
Because you’re importing the team from a third party, the import flow does not include an option to add Core members. You can, however, add Additional members at this stage.
Additional members don't typically act as entity owners in Cortex, but are still part of the functional team, and will receive notifications.
From there, the rest of the import flow is the same as creating a team manually: you can add additional members, Slack channels, and links before confirming the team's details.
Create team manually
If you don’t have an identity provider with updated team information, you can create a team manually within Cortex. Because teams are important for effective ownership, it's recommended that you create teams in Cortex even if you don't have a single source of truth for team information.
The process for creating a team manually is almost identical to importing one. Since the name and identifier aren't provided for you, you'll need to add those first.
The rest of the steps that follow are the same as importing a team — you'll add parents and children, on-call details, and links.
Once you've created a team, you'll be able to find it on the Teams page within the hierarchy. If you haven't added parents or children, you can disable View as hierarchy to see the list of all teams.