# Building on the foundation: Catalogs, Scorecards, Workflows, and Eng Intelligence

With your foundation in place, it's time to put Cortex to work. This article covers the core features your team will use every day and how they turn your connected data into real visibility, accountability, and action.

### Working with the catalog

A [catalog](/ingesting-data-into-cortex/catalogs.md) is a defined selection of entities you use to track the components of your infrastructure—services, domains, cloud resources, and more. Entities are defined in YAML, but catalogs are created in the Cortex UI and act like filters that group related entities together. A single entity can belong to multiple catalogs.\
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Cortex includes four built-in catalogs: Services, Infrastructure (with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud resources pulled in automatically), Domains (displayed hierarchically), and Teams (displayed hierarchically with a Scorecard leaderboard).\
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You can rename the defaults or create custom catalogs to match your organization's structure.

### Understanding Scorecards

[Scorecards](/standardize/scorecards.md) are how you establish and enforce standards across your entities—whether that's defining best practices, tracking migrations, promoting accountability, standardizing configuration, or setting maturity benchmarks. Each Scorecard evaluates entities against a set of rules, which can reference metadata within Cortex or pull data from third-party integrations. Levels and points add a layer of gamification, giving developers clear, incremental goals.\
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Scorecards are designed for ongoing standards, not time-bound pushes. When you need to hit a specific deadline, create an [Initiative](/improve/initiatives.md) to drive focused progress by a target date.

#### Reports

Use reporting in Cortex to track how entities perform against Scorecards, analyze Scorecard trends over time, and surface the areas that need attention. Reports apply to published Scorecards in your workspace. See [Reports](/improve/reports.md) for more information.\
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Cortex offers several built-in reports out of the box: Executive, All Scorecards, Bird's Eye, Progress, and Report Card.

### Using Workflows

Engineering teams use [Workflows](/streamline/workflows.md) when they need to standardize and automate high-stakes operations like service creation, access provisioning, or incident response, especially when those processes involve multiple tools, people, or approval steps. They're also useful for onboarding, where repeatability and speed matter.

### Leveraging Eng Intelligence

[Eng Intelligence](/improve/eng-intelligence.md) gives engineering leaders a clear, data-driven view of how their organization builds and ships software. Surface bottlenecks in the pull request lifecycle, measure incident response, understand cross-team activity, and identify where to dig deeper.\
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Eng Intelligence in Cortex includes:

* Dashboards
  * [DORA Dashboard](/improve/eng-intelligence/dashboards/dora-dashboard.md) - the speed, reliability, and efficiency of your development practices at a glance.
  * [Velocity Dashboard](/improve/eng-intelligence/dashboards/velocity-dashboard.md) - team progress across the software development lifecycle.
  * [Copilot Dashboard](/improve/eng-intelligence/dashboards/ai-impact.md) - Copilot adoption and engagement across engineering.
  * [Custom Dashboards](/improve/eng-intelligence/dashboards/custom.md) - shared views tailored to the metrics your organization cares about most.
* [Metrics Explorer](/improve/eng-intelligence/metrics-explorer.md) - Explore trends over time and drill into the underlying data, covering deploys, version control, project management (Jira), and incident management (PagerDuty).
* [Custom metrics](/improve/eng-intelligence/custom-metrics.md) - Define your own time series metrics to power Eng Intelligence analytics, drawing from your Cortex integrations or internal data sources.

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