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Rather than assigning owners to every entity individually, you can define ownership at the domain level and have it propagate to child entities. This is useful for large catalogs where many entities share a common accountable team. Inheritance is configured per owner using the inheritance field in the x-cortex-owners block. If omitted, it defaults to NONE.

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Inheritance modes

Each owner on a parent entity has one of three inheritance values.

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APPEND

This owner is added to the owner list of every child entity, regardless of whether the child already has owners. Use it for a team that must be included on everything in the domain, such as a platform or security team.

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FALLBACK

This owner is assigned to a child entity only if that child has no other valid owners (including other fallbacks). FALLBACK applies to children only, not to the domain itself. Use it as a safety net so new or unowned entities in the domain always have an owner.

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NONE

This owner belongs to the domain but does not propagate to children. This is the default.

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How inheritance works across levels

  • Inheritance is transitive. Owners continue down every level of the hierarchy. For example, a domain’s APPEND owner is also added to the services inside its child domains.
  • Duplicate owners are listed once. If an entity receives the same owner from more than one ancestor, Cortex lists that owner once and shows the closest ancestor as its source.
  • The stronger mode wins. If the same owner arrives with different modes, APPEND takes precedence over FALLBACK, and both take precedence over NONE. A mode is never downgraded.

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Configuring inheritance in the Cortex UI

You can configure inheritance in the Cortex UI in two places:
  • On a domain’s owners - When you create or edit a domain, select Append, Fallback, or None for each owner.
  • On a relationship type - When you create a relationship type, toggle on Ownership and choose Fallback or Append. Owners then flow from the source entity to the destination entity of each relationship of that type.

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Viewing the source of an inherited owner

When ownership is layered across a hierarchy, it can be hard to tell why a particular team appears as an owner on a given entity. To trace it:
  1. Navigate to the entity’s details page.
  2. In the entity’s metadata sidebar, locate the Owners block.
  3. Next to an owner, click the Inheritance chain icon.
    The 'Inheritance chain icon'; is found within the Owners section in the metadata sidebar.

    Cortex shows the source entity, the relationship type, and the rule (APPEND or FALLBACK) that caused the owner to propagate. The icon only appears for inherited owners; direct owners defined on the entity itself have no chain to display.
Last modified on October 8, 2026