# Cortex Beta Program & Release Phases

At Cortex, we're constantly building new features to improve operational maturity and reduce developer friction through engineering operations. Our beta program allows you to get early access to upcoming features, help shape their development, and provide valuable feedback before they reach general availability.

### Release phases

Cortex uses a phased approach to release new features, allowing us to gather feedback and iterate based on real-world usage. Understanding these phases helps you know what to expect when trying out new features.

<table><thead><tr><th>Release phase</th><th>Who can access?</th><th width="187.27734375">Purpose</th><th>Support</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Private Beta</td><td>Select group of external customers by invitation only</td><td>Test real-world use cases and gather targeted feedback from pilot customers who can handle pre-release features</td><td>Direct support from the Cortex product team</td></tr><tr><td>Public Beta</td><td>All customers have it on by default, but certain features may only be available to cloud customers</td><td>Offer new features more broadly while still refining details and fixing bugs based on real-world usage at scale</td><td>Standard Cortex support channels</td></tr><tr><td>Research Preview</td><td>All cloud customers have it on by default</td><td>Quickly ship and iterate on AI features</td><td>Standard Cortex support channels</td></tr><tr><td><strong>General Availability (GA)</strong></td><td>All customers by default</td><td>Full-fledged, stable release ready for production use</td><td>Standard Cortex support channels</td></tr></tbody></table>

### Current beta features

We're currently running beta programs for several exciting features:

<table><thead><tr><th>Feature</th><th width="212.6441650390625">Status</th><th>Get Access</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><a href="../improve/eng-intelligence/dashboards/ai-impact">AI Impact Dashboard</a></td><td>Public Beta</td><td>Default</td></tr><tr><td><a href="beta/custom-dashboards">Custom Dashboards</a></td><td>Public Beta</td><td>Default</td></tr><tr><td><a href="../improve/reports/birds-eye">Entity Relationships Bird's Eye Report</a><br></td><td>Public Beta</td><td>Default</td></tr><tr><td><a href="beta/entity-relationships-birds-eye-private-beta-1">Entity Relationships All Scorecards Report</a></td><td>Private Beta</td><td>Reach out to your account team</td></tr><tr><td><a href="beta/incident-core-types-incident.io-private-beta">Incident Core Types: incident.io</a></td><td>Private Beta</td><td>Reach out to your account team</td></tr><tr><td>Ownership Recommendations</td><td>Research Preview</td><td>Default</td></tr></tbody></table>

#### AI Impact Dashboard for GitHub Copilot (Public Beta)

Measure adoption and impact of AI coding tools, starting with GitHub Copilot, across your engineering teams. Learn more [here](https://docs.cortex.io/improve/eng-intelligence/dashboards/ai-impact).

**Key features:**

* Team-level AI adoption correlated with delivery and reliability
* Impact of recent AI usage on engineering performance
* Detailed user-level AI adoption trends over time

This feature is only available for cloud-hosted customers.

#### Custom dashboards (Public Beta)

Easily create shared views of your key engineering metrics. Whether you’re tracking team delivery, reliability, or AI adoption, you can now design dashboards that bring your most important insights together. Learn more [here](https://docs.cortex.io/improve/eng-intelligence/dashboards/custom).

**Key features:**

* Ability to build tailored dashboards tied to your priorities
* Automatic sharing across Eng Intel users for alignment

#### Entity Relationships All Scorecards Report (Private Beta)

View performance across multiple Scorecards simultaneously in a single consolidated report. Compare how your organization performs across different areas, all in one place. Learn more [here](#entity-relationships-all-scorecards-report-private-beta).

Key features:

* Compare multiple Scorecards side-by-side and track total aggregate scores
* Roll up scores across entity relationships for all selected Scorecards
* Navigate hierarchical views to understand performance across teams and domains

#### Entity Relationships Bird's Eye Report (Private Beta)

Get a complete view of a Scorecard's performance across your organization with hierarchical rollups and nested views. Bird's Eye helps you quickly identify hot spots from org-wide trends down to individual services. Learn more [here](#entity-relationships-birds-eye-report-private-beta).

**Key features:**

* Roll up point-based and level-based scores across entity relationships
* Navigate teams, domains, and groups in nested, expandable views
* Drill down to entity details and preview Scorecard results inline

#### Incident core types: incident.io (Private Beta)

Our all new integration platform provides a unified, reliable way to ingest, view, and analyze incident data from incident.io. This is the first integration we are migrating to this new platform.

**Key features:**

* **Unified incident catalog**: View all incidents across your organization in one place, with rich metadata including severity, status, affected entities, and more.
* **Multiple data sources**: Ingest incidents from incident.io via our integration platform, or push custom incident data via API,
* **Engineering Intelligence integration**: Access incident metrics you rely on today, now powered by a single, consistent data pipeline.

This feature is only available for cloud-hosted customers.

#### Ownership predications (Research Preview)

The ownership predication model leverages machine learning to infer and recommend the most likely owners of a service using signals from Git activity. This helps teams maintain accurate and up-to-date ownership attribution across their software catalog. Learn more [here](https://docs.cortex.io/ingesting-data-into-cortex/entities/ownership#recommendation).

**Key features:**

* View all ownership recommendations in a single page
* Accept or reject recommendations

This feature is only available for cloud-hosted customers.

### Join our beta program

#### Why join?

**Early Access:** Be among the first to try new features before they're available to everyone

**Shape the Product:** Your feedback directly influences feature development and prioritization

**Exclusive Perks:** Beta participants may receive special recognition, early access to future features, or other benefits

**Direct Collaboration:** Work closely with our product team to ensure private beta features meet your needs

#### How to join

1. **Review current beta features** listed above to see what interests you
2. **Try out** any public beta features already enabled and provide any feedback through the link on the feature's public beta banner.
3. **Click "Request Access"** on any private beta feature you'd like to try
4. **Fill out the brief form** to tell us about your use case
5. **We'll review your request** and follow up within 3-5 business days

Not all requests can be accommodated for Private Beta features due to capacity constraints, but we'll do our best to include as many participants as possible.

#### What we ask of beta testers

* **Provide Feedback:** Share your experiences, both positive and negative, through our feedback channels
* **Report Bugs:** Help us identify issues by reporting them promptly with detailed information
* **Be Patient:** Beta features may have rough edges or change during the testing period