# Cortex quick start guide **Welcome to Cortex!**\ \ Cortex is an Engineering Operations Platform (EngOps) that brings your entire engineering ecosystem into a single, trusted source of truth. Instead of hunting through spreadsheets, wikis, and a dozen disconnected tools to answer basic questions like, *Who owns this service?*, *Is it production-ready?*, or *What depends on it?*, your team gets the answers at a glance, always up to date. Under the hood, Cortex continuously polls your existing tools and stitches that data into a unified model of your software. On top of that model, you can define standards, automate self-service actions, and give every engineer the context they need to ship reliable software faster. ### The building blocks Before you begin, take a minute to get familiar with the core Cortex concepts. They're the foundation for everything in this guide and everything that comes after. #### Entities An entity is anything in your engineering world that you want to track. Most commonly, that means services and the infrastructure they run on, but entities can also represent teams, domains, APIs, pipelines, ML models, or any other construct that matters to how you build software. Entities can own other entities, depend on each other, and roll up into higher-level groupings—which is what turns a flat list of components into a real map of your architecture. #### Catalogs A catalog is a curated view of your entities, defined by a filter you set: a specific entity type (like all services or all APIs), a group, or a custom CQL query. Rather than browsing everything at once, catalogs let you carve out focused slices of your ecosystem so the right people see the right things without the noise. #### Scorecards A scorecard is how you define and enforce quality standards across your entities. You set the rules (what "good" looks like), organize them into levels (bronze, silver, gold, or whatever progression fits), and Cortex continuously evaluates each entity against them. The result is a clear, always-current score for things like production readiness, security posture, or operational maturity. #### Initiatives An initiative is a focused, time-bound campaign for rolling out a specific improvement across your entities. You define the goal, e.g. *Migrate all services to Kubernetes by Q3*, scope it to the right entities, and set a deadline. Cortex tracks progress automatically, surfaces what's still outstanding, and keeps the right owners accountable. #### Relationships / Dependencies Relationships capture how your entities connect to one another, turning a flat list of components into a real map of your architecture. Some relationships are implicit and created automatically, like the hierarchy between domains, teams, and services, or the dependencies between services. Others are generic relationships that you configure to reflect the connections that matter to your organization, whether that's "calls", "stores data in", "deployed by", or anything else. #### Entity descriptor (YAML) Every entity in Cortex is backed by a YAML descriptor—a single file that captures its metadata, ownership, and context. Each `x-cortex-*` block defines a specific piece of information: owners, links to dashboards or runbooks, Slack channels, custom metadata, and more. You can edit descriptors directly in the Cortex UI, or manage them in your own repositories and sync them via GitOps—whichever fits your team's workflow. #### Integrations Integrations are the connections between Cortex and the tools your team already uses—GitHub, PagerDuty, Datadog, Jira, your cloud provider, and so on. Each integration pulls live data into Cortex and attaches it to the right entity automatically. A service in the catalog isn’t just a name; it’s a rich, current view of its on-call rotation, deployment history, open incidents, documentation, and dependencies. #### The catalog Your catalog is the collection of all your entities in one place. It’s searchable, filterable, and browsable. It's the home base your developers will return to every day to understand what exists, who owns it, and how healthy it is. As you add entities and turn on integrations, the catalog fills itself in and becomes the foundation for everything else Cortex can do: scorecards, self-service actions, and AI-powered insights. #### Custom data Custom data is how you extend Cortex with information specific to your organization. It includes user-defined metadata (any key-value context you want to track), audit trails that record how entities change over time, and operational health metrics like deploy frequency, lead time, and other indicators of how your software is actually performing. If the out-of-the-box integrations don't capture what your team needs, custom data fills the gap. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.cortex.io/get-started/quickstart.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.