Overview: Ingesting data into Cortex

Getting your data into Cortex is the foundation for data-driven decision making and improved accountability across your teams.

By connecting your services, repositories, teams, infrastructure, and more, Cortex can provide a complete, up-to-date view of your ecosystem. This powers the ability to track ownership of entities, enforce production readiness and other standards via Scorecards, standardize common developer Workflows for entities, and more. It also ensures your developers can find what they need, understand how everything fits together, and make better decisions at every stage of the development lifecycle.

How Cortex handles data modeling

Some internal developer portals start with too much rigidity or too little guidance. A rigid platform prevents you from correctly modeling relationships between key entities in your environment. An overly modular approach requires you to rebuild business logic for each use case, resulting in the same fractured experience you intended to solve for.

Cortex solves for this by giving you the flexibility to mirror your unique business logic across your data, and the structure to persist that logic everywhere:

• Data models are foundational, but configurable.

• Integrations are available, but extensible.

• Experience is complete, but customizable.

With consistent developer workflow and a configurable experience, it's easier to accurately represent your services and infrastructure in Cortex. See an overview of Cortex data concepts below.

Need assistance with data modeling? To ensure a smooth implementation, most of our customers partner with Cortex Professional Services (PS) for hands-on assistance, including expert guidance on data modeling. Contact [email protected] to learn more.

Connect your data

The pages in this section cover the following topics:

• How to import and manage entities

  • An entity is an object that represents a software construct. Entities are represented in YAML and can pull in data from integrations. Entities can have dependencies, can be set up in a hierarchical structure, and can be connected to other entities through entity relationships. Entity standards can be ensured through Scorecards. Learn more in Managing entities.

• How to create and manage catalogs

  • Catalogs are a defined selection of entities. You can use them to track and store information about all the components that make up your infrastructure. Learn more in Managing catalogs.

• Integrations

  • Cortex supports pulling data across a broad set of integrations to create a single pane of glass. See all integrations in the sub-pages under Integrations.

Want to learn more? Check out the Cortex Academy course on Catalogs, Entities, and Relationships, available to all Cortex customers and POVs.

Cortex data concepts reference table

Learn about the basic data concepts for Cortex below.

Concept	Definition
Team	A group of humans responsible for something
Service	A running technical component (API, job, infra service)
Domain	A foundational grouping layer that represents a logical or functional area of your organization. The bone structure of your Cortex model. Domains form the base hierarchy that organizes entities (services, systems, pipelines) under stable, high-level boundaries. Each domain reflects a cohesive area of ownership, business function, or technical responsibility.
Custom entity	Any other trackable thing - ML models, Clients, environment, release, Products. Use this when "service" doesn't fit.
Catalog	A folder-like visual container, for UI organization only
Group	A logical collection for search, filtering, and reporting. Similar to a label or tag set.
Dependency	One entity relies on another. Enables impact analysis and notifications.
Ownership	Accountability link between a team and entity.
Entity relationship	Generic link between entities
Hierarchy	Parent-child or part-of structure. Enables inheritance ownership.