Defining ownership

Ownership is a core use case of Cortex, as many organizations seek to establish accurate ownership of services, data, and other entities. Accurate ownership is foundational for accountability, incident response, security reviews, compliance, and developer productivity. Without clear ownership, critical issues can go unresolved and services can fall through the cracks.

Avoid inefficient manual processes: Use Cortex's ownership prediction model to solve entity ownership quickly. Cortex automatically predicts entity owners so your developers don't waste time hunting down the wrong person.

Ownership can be defined by accepting Cortex's automated recommendations for ownership, pulled in from third-party integrations, or defined manually in the Cortex UI. Ownership can also be inherited from an entity's fallback or append configuration.

Ownership drives which users will receive notifications from Cortex, including alerts for on-call changes, when verification is needed on an assigned entity, when an entity is re-evaluated and its Scorecard changes, and more.

Where to view entity owners

When viewing an entity, the owners appear in the metadata bar on the right side of the page:

Click into the team name to view the team's entity page, including a list of members and a list of entities owned by that team.

You can create or import the teams and users who will be defined as owners for your entities.

Define owners for entities

Types of owners

You can define owners based on:

• A team

  • We recommend setting up teams as owners. If you link a group in your YAML file from a different platform (such as Okta), the members of the team will be automatically updated in Cortex if anyone leaves your organization and is removed from your integrated identity provider.

• A user email address

Methods for defining ownership

Owners can be defined:

• By accepting Cortex's automated recommendations for owners, based on repository activity

• By pulling information from third-party integrations in the entity descriptor YAML

  • Ownership can also be inherited via fallback or append configuration.
• Directly in the Cortex UI

• Automatically if Cortex detects that an entity is owned by a team that does not yet exist in Cortex

  • If an entity's YAML references a team, but that team doesn't have a corresponding entry within Cortex, Cortex will automatically create a team. The team will include a label that says Automatically created by Cortex.

Recommendation

Cortex automated recommendations for ownership

Research preview

Not seeing the results you expect? This is an early version of the Ownership tool. Please send feedback and bug reports to us via this form. Note the following considerations:

• This feature is supported for entities associated with a repository in GitHub, GitLab, or Azure DevOps. Mapping is done on per repository basis, so mapping teams owners to file paths within a monorepo is not supported.

• You must have teams configured in Cortex and team members must be identity-mapped in order for Cortex to provide recommendations. The more teams and people you have mapped, the better the recommendations!
• Cortex analyzes the last 6 months of data, so if a repository has not had code changes within that time period, we will not have a recommendation.

• To accept or reject the recommended owner, the user must have the Edit entities permission.

• If you are using GitOps, you can view recommendations, but you cannot accept them from the UI.

Cortex analyzes a repository and automatically recommends a team owner for entities that do not have an owner.

If an entity does not have an owner and Cortex has recommendations for who the owner should be, it will be flagged in the ownership tool under Tools > Ownership, in the "Owners" section of an entity details page overview, in the "Owners" sidebar link on an entity details page, and it will appear during the import process when adding entities.

Review ownership recommendations in bulk

Users can edit ownership on this page only if they have edit access for all entities. If a user only has edit access for some entities, they can accept ownership recommendations from an entity's details page, as described below under "Review ownership recommendations per entity."

To review and assign ownership across all unowned entities:

1. In the main nav of Cortex, click Tools > Ownership.

   • A list of recommendations for ownership is displayed.

     
2. Review and accept the recommended owners.

   • To apply all recommended owners: Ensure the checkboxes for all entities are selected, then at the top of the list, click Accept recommendations.

   • To apply selected owners: On the left side of the list, check the box next to the entities whose recommended owners you want to accept. When you are finished selecting, click Accept recommendations at the top of the list.

Review ownership recommendations per entity

Users can accept ownership recommendations for an entity if they have edit access for that specific entity, and if UI editing is enabled for that entity type under Settings > GitOps.

1. On an entity details page next to the "Owners" field, click Recommendations.
2. Review the suggested owners. To accept a recommendation, check the box next to the recommended owner then click Add owners.

Entity descriptor

Define owners in the entity descriptor

The x-cortex-owners field allows you to define a list of owners of type email or group.

x-cortex-owners:
  # Groups can be pulled from various integrations
  - type: group
    name: my-team
    provider: CORTEX
    description: This is a description for this owner # optional
  - type: email
    email: [e-mail]
    description: This is a description for this owner # optional

Cortex recognizes groups from the following integrations:

• Azure Active Directory
• Azure DevOps
• BambooHR
• GitHub
• GitLab
• Google
• Okta
• Opsgenie
• ServiceNow
• Workday

The value of provider is the name of the integration that the group is coming from. The available list is:

• ACTIVE_DIRECTORY

• AZURE_DEVOPS

• BAMBOO_HR

• CORTEX: Use when referring to a team defined in Cortex; these teams do not map to identities from a connected integration.

• GITHUB

• GITLAB

• GOOGLE

• OKTA

• OPSGENIE

• SERVICE_NOW

• WORKDAY

name is a case-sensitive field that refers to the following:

• if your provider is CORTEX, name corresponds to the x-cortex-tag for the Cortex team you want to identify as an owner

• otherwise, name corresponds to the upstream identifier of your owner from your integration

Cortex UI

Define owners in the Cortex UI

1. In Cortex, navigate to Catalogs > All entities.
2. Search for and select the entity whose ownership you want to edit.

3. In the upper right corner of the entity's page, click Configure entity.

4. Click the Owners tab, then click +Add next to Teams or Users.

   

   In the Owners tab, click +Add.

   • Add team:

     • Select a team from the dropdown menu, then click Add.

   • Add user:

     • Select a user from the dropdown menu, then click Add.

     • You can also add a user who is not listed in Cortex. To do this, enter an email address into the Email address field, then click Add.

Automatic discovery for AWS

Cortex can automatically discover ownership for your AWS resources using their owner tag. To enable this, make sure that your AWS resources have an owner tag matching the x-cortex-tag of the corresponding Cortex team and enable the Sync ownership from AWS toggle in Settings > AWS.

You can pull in all resources from AWS, and Cortex syncs those owners automatically based on their tags in AWS, allowing you to easily keep the resource owners up to date.

Cortex syncs ownership from AWS every day at 6 am UTC.

Viewing entity ownership

View your owned entities

To see a list of entities you own directly, navigate to Catalogs > All entities then click the Mine tab:

Child team visibility

To see a list of entities you own directly and entities that are owned by your team's child teams:

1. Navigate to Catalogs > All entities.

   1. The list defaults to displaying the "Mine" tab, showing only the entities you own.

2. At the top of the list, click Display.

3. Enable the toggle next to Include child teams.

   
4. Click Done.

View a team's owned entities

You can filter the entity list by owner:

1. Under Catalogs > All entities, click the All tab.
2. In the upper right corner, click Filter.

3. In the left side of the filter modal, click Teams. Select teams from the dropdown, then click Apply at the bottom.

View entities owned by all teams within a hierachy

Teams can exist within hierarchies. You can view a list of all entities that are owned by the parent team and all children teams in the hierarchy:

1. Navigate to the parent team's page in Cortex.

2. Click the Entities tab.

3. Click Display, then enable the toggle next to Inherited Children.

   

   While viewing owned entities, click Display then add inherited children to the view.
4. Click Done.

The list will now display all entities owned by the parent and its children teams. Note that this setting does not persist when you navigate away from the page.

Read more about hierarchies in Setting up a team hierachy.

Ownership settings in Cortex

Under Settings > Entities, there are several settings relating to teams. Read more about these in the Teams documentation.