Standardize and automate Developer Onboarding
To configure your Cortex workspace for successful Developer Onboarding, we recommend the following actions:
Connect Data: Ingest data and ensure ownership is assigned to your entities
Streamline: Automate common onboarding processes via Workflows, have new developers configure Cortex MCP to get quick answers about your workspace and environment, and view centralized daily tasks on the engineering homepage
Improve: Managers can review Eng Intelligence metrics and take action when issues in the onboarding process are surfaced
Use Cortex features to successfully onboard developers
Expand the tiles below to learn about configuring Cortex features to onboard new developers.
Step 1: Ingest data and solve ownership 🔌
Before getting started on any use case, it is crucial to import your services, resources, infrastructure, and other entities, and to have clear visibility into the ownership of your entities.
Connecting your entities to Cortex establishes a single source of truth across your engineering organization. It enables the ability to track progress via Scorecards, automate Workflows, and gain insights from Eng Intelligence. It also gives new engineers a clear view of the systems they need to interact with.
Setting ownership of entities ensures that every service and system is clearly linked to accountable teams or individuals, enabling faster incident response, reducing handoff friction, and making it possible to enforce standards consistently.
Relevant integrations
Before you focus on Developer Onboarding, Cortex recommends integrating with your essential tools so you can establish best practices before bringing on new team members:
Version control: Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab
Enforce best practices like peer reviews, CI/CD pipelines, and versioning
Teams/ownership: Azure DevOps, BambooHR, Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), GitHub, GitLab, Google, Okta, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, and Workday.
Ensure entities have owners and foster a culture of accountability
On-call: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps), xMatters
Track on-call responsibilities to confirm that support teams are always assigned
Project management: GitHub, Jira, Azure DevOps, ClickUp
Track incidents, bugs, and compliance issues
Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams
Having communication tools connected is crucial for ensuring new developers know which channels to communicate in when they have questions about specific entities, and ensuring developers receive notifications from Cortex
Cortex also recommends linking to runbooks and documentation for your entities, ensuring your users have access to critical information.
With your data in Cortex, you have a jumping-off point to configure your workspace for a streamlined onboarding process for new engineers.
Step 2: Automate onboarding processes via Workflows ⚙️
Action item: Configure Workflows
You can use Workflows to streamline and standardize onboarding processes, reducing the manual effort required to get started.
Workflows to streamline onboarding processes
Configure Workflows to provision access to tools (such as GitHub, PagerDuty, Jira, and GitHub Copilot) and set up a new test environment for an engineer.
Workflows to establish adherence to best practices
When Scaffolding new services, you can use templates to ensure that every new service starts with baseline standards, helping your new developers be successful from day one.
See the documentation on registering a Scaffolder template and configuring a Scaffolder block.
Step 3: Configure Cortex MCP 🤖
Action Item for new developers: Configure Cortex MCP
Cortex MCP reduces onboarding friction by meeting new engineers where they work (their IDE) and letting them self-serve Cortex context in natural language.
Ask questions like "Who is on call for backend-server?" or "Give me all the details for parser-service." MCP fetches the data in real time from Cortex's API, ensuring accurate and up-to-date information about service health, ownership, and operational readiness.
Step 4: Review Eng Intelligence metrics 📈
Action Item for managers: Review Eng Intelligence metrics
Managers can use Eng Intelligence features — the DORA dashboard, Velocity Dashboard, and Metrics Explorer — to surface and track key engineering metrics related to developer productivity.
Review trends in areas such as deployment frequency, review latency, and other indicators that are important to your organization. This helps you identify areas where your new developers and their teams might need additional support.
Developer Onboarding in action
Learn about following Developer Onboarding processes in Cortex in Developer Onboarding in action.
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