Add services

Services are a default entity type in Cortex, used for entities such as microservices, libraries, components, etc – essentially any codebase-like module.

View services

To view services, click Catalogs > Services from the main nav.

When you open the Services page, you'll see tabs labeled Mine and All, which denote services you own and all services visible to you in your Cortex workspace.

The services list has tabs for All and Mine.

Configure the view of your service list

At the top of your services list, you can choose how the list is displayed:

• Name: Click Name, then choose whether to sort by name or identifier, and whether the sort order should be ascending or descending.

• Display: Click Display, then choose whether to display hierarchies, whether to show archived, and which columns to display.

• Filter: To narrow the scope of your list, click Filter then select criteria you'd like to filter by.

Creating services

You can create services:

• By importing them from a connected integration

• Manually in the Cortex UI

• Via the entity descriptor YAML through GitOps
• Via the API

Import

You can import services directly from third-party integrations:

1. In Cortex, navigate to Catalogs > All entities, then click Import entities.

2. Choose Import discovered entities.
3. Select the integration to import from.

4. On the following page, after the integration sync is complete, a list of entities from the integration are displayed. Check the boxes next to any entities you want to import.

   • If you have a large volume of entites, click Filter in the upper right corner of the results list to select and apply entity type filters.

5. At the bottom of the page, click Next step.

6. Edit the details for the entity:

   1. Type: Select Service.

   2. Entity name: Enter a human readable name.

   3. Identifier: This field is auto-populated based on your entity name. It is a unique identifier for your entity. This is also known as the x-cortex-tag.

   4. Description: Enter a description of the entity to help others understand its purpose.

   5. Groups: Select groups to segment your entity.
   6. Owners: Define ownership for your entity. We recommend selecting team owners to keep your ownership information up-to-date through any future personnel changes.

      • You may see owners that Cortex recommends based on repository activity. You can accept or reject the recommendations.
   7. Links: Add links to external documentation, such as runbooks, docs, logs, or custom categories.

   8. Parents: Define parent domains. This is where you configure the hierarchy for your entity. These can be visualized in the relationship graph.
   9. Dependencies: Select entities that this entity depends on. These can be visualized in the relationship graph.
   10. On-call: Configure on-call information.

   11. Repository: Select the repository associated with this entity.

7. If you selected more than one entity: After the first entity is configured, click the name of the next entity on the right to navigate to the detail editor for that entity.
8. Click Confirm import.

Manual

To create a service:

1. In the main nav of Cortex, click Catalogs > Services.

2. At the top of the Services page, click +Import entities.

3. Choose Create entities manually.
4. Configure the form:

   • Type: Select Service.

   • Entity name: Enter a human readable name.

   • Identifier: This field is auto-populated based on your entity name. It is a unique identifier for your entity. This is also known as the x-cortex-tag.

   • Description: Enter a description of the entity to help others understand its purpose.

   • Groups: Select groups to segment your entity.
   • Owners: Define ownership for your entity. We recommend selecting team owners to keep your ownership information up-to-date through any future personnel changes.

   • Links: Add links to external documentation, such as runbooks, docs, logs, or custom categories.

   • Parents: Define parent domains. This is where you configure the hierarchy for your entity. These can be visualized in the relationship graph.
   • Dependencies: Select entities that this entity depends on. These can be visualized in the relationship graph.
   • On-call: Configure on-call information.

   • Repository: Select the repository associated with this entity.

5. When you are finished, click Confirm import at the bottom of the page.

Entity descriptor

Service entity descriptor

A barebones spec file has the OpenAPI version, along with an info section that contains some basic details.

openapi: 3.0.1
info:
  title: My Service
  description: This is my cool service.
  x-cortex-tag: my-service
  x-cortex-type: service

Required fields

The only required fields under info are the title, x-cortex-tag, and x-cortex-type. The description is optional, but we highly recommend adding descriptions to all of your entities.

Example cortex.yaml for a service

openapi: 3.0.1
info:
  title: Chat Service
  description: Chat service is responsible for handling chat feature.
  x-cortex-tag: chat-service
  x-cortex-type: service
  x-cortex-parents: # parents can be of type domain only
  - tag: notifications-domain
  - tag: support-domain
  x-cortex-groups:
  - python
  x-cortex-owners:
  - type: group
    name: Delta
    provider: OKTA
    description: Delta Team
  x-cortex-slack:
    channels:
    - name: delta-team
      notificationsEnabled: true
      description: This is a description for the delta-team Slack channel # optional
  x-cortex-link:
  - name: Chat ServiceAPI Spec
    type: OPENAPI
    url: ./docs/chat-service-openapi-spec.yaml
  x-cortex-custom-metadata:
    core-service: true
  x-cortex-dependency:
    - tag: authentication-service
    - tag: chat-database
  x-cortex-git:
    github:
      repository: org/chat-service
  x-cortex-oncall:
    pagerduty:
      id: ASDF1234
      type: SCHEDULE
  x-cortex-apm:
    datadog:
      monitors:
        - 12345
  x-cortex-issues:
    jira:
      projects:
        - CS

API

You can create, update, and delete services using the Cortex API.

Edit services

It is possible to edit entities after creating them:

1. Navigate to the entity's page.

2. In the upper right corner, click Configure entity.

3. Make any desired changes.

   • Note: The only field you cannot edit is the identifier.

4. At the bottom of the screen, click Save changes.