Scorecards

Use Scorecards to establish best practices, track migration, promote accountability among teams, enforce standardization across entities, or define maturity standards.

1

Define

First, you create a Scorecard to set rules and define standards.

Learn more: Create a Scorecard.

2

Assess

Next, you review the Scorecard to assess where the teams and entities stand today, allowing you to identify areas for improvement.

Learn more: Review and evaluate a Scorecard.

3

Take action

Last, you take action: Prioritize what to fix, set deadlines with Initiatives, and continue your Scorecard practices to ensure ongoing improvement.

Learn more: Take action on a Scorecard.

In a Scorecard, entities are scored against rules. Rules can reference entities' metadata within Cortex, and can pull data from third-party integrations. Use levels and points in Scorecards to gamify the process and encourage developers to make progress toward goals.

Creating Scorecards

You can configure Scorecards directly in the Cortex UI, without needing to manage them solely through code. This makes it easier to get started, iterate over time, and involve more teammates without requiring deep context. If you prefer a GitOps approach, that's supported as well. See Scorecards as code for more information.

On this page, learn about viewing and editing Scorecards. For step by step instructions on creating Scorecards, see Creating a Scorecard. To learn about evaluating a Scorecard and mitigating failed rules, see Review and evaluate Scorecards.

Common Scorecard use cases

For information about common use cases and examples, see Scorecard examples.

Looking to dive deeper? Check out the Cortex Academy course on Scorecards, available to all Cortex customers and POVs.

Viewing and editing Scorecards

View Scorecards list

Click Scorecards in the main nav in Cortex.

All of your organization’s Scorecards are listed under All. Under Mine, you’ll find Scorecards you’ve created, as well as Scorecards that evaluate entities you own.

Edit a Scorecard

If you have not disabled UI editing, then you can edit a Scorecard in the Cortex UI. You can edit the name, description, levels, rules, draft status, filter criteria, and the entity's being evaluated by the Scorecard. You cannot edit a Scorecard's unique identifier.

You must have the Edit Scorecard permission.

To edit:

1. Navigate to the Scorecard in Cortex.

2. Click Edit in the upper right corner of the Scorecard page:

   
3. Make changes to your Scorecard, then at the bottom of the page, click Save Scorecard.

Any time you edit and save your Scorecard, Cortex will automatically begin reevaluating the relevant entities to reflect your changes.

Scorecard examples

Gamification motivates developers to not only progress through the levels of a Scorecard, but to maintain the quality of their entities over time.

See the Scorecard examples page to view common use cases and see how others are motivating their teams with Scorecards.

Configuring Scorecard settings

Admins can configure settings and view Scorecard rule exemptions under Settings > Scorecards.

See Scorecard settings for more information.

Troubleshooting and FAQ

Cortex offers a wide variety of out-of-the-box integrations compatible with Scorecard rules. Sometimes, a Scorecard may have multiple integration queries with different endpoints, each with its own rate limits. While we strive to manage these rate limits efficiently, please keep the following points in mind regarding rule failures and third-party integrations:

Are errors logged in the UI?

Yes, any errors will be displayed alongside the rule for the relevant entity in the UI.

Are the rules related to the errors retried?

If we encounter a rate limit error, we will retry the rule for most integrations. This process occurs up to five times with a backoff period between attempts. If the rule fails after five retries, the last recorded score will be used.

How are scores affected by missing values due to API rate limiting?

If all retries are still affected by rate limit errors, we will use the last known score for the rule. This also applies to 5xx errors from upstream APIs and any unexpected errors from the Cortex side. If a new rule fails without a previous score, the rule will fail and display a 429 error.