Once you’ve imported a few services, you can start to make use of the catalog to find information about them. The catalog opens by default when you log into Cortex, but you can always navigate back to it by clicking Services.

Your catalog will be broken down into All and Mine. Any services that have you a designated owner will appear under Mine, while all of your organization's services will populate under All.

Searching and filtering

To easily find all relevant services, you can search the catalog by name, identifier and description. You can also filter by service groups or owners.

You can filter by multiple service groups or service owners. 

Note: For service groups, the filter will conduct an OR search. For service owners, the filter will conduct an AND search.

You can also sort the Catalog alphabetically by name or identifier.

At any point, you can use the Share function to generate a pre-configured link to the catalog with your filters and sort applied.

For quick access anywhere within Cortex, you can always use of the global search.

The global search will return services along with teams, scorecards, resources, and initiatives, so you’re not limited to the catalog.

Owned services

At any point, you can see which individual users or teams own a particular service by navigating to that service's home page.

If the service is owned by a team, Cortex will sync team members in the background to keep owner information up-to-date. Additional information about the teams, like Slack channels and email addresses, can be found under Service Owners.

Cortex works with your identity provider to map user email addresses to specific teams. All of the services owned by a specific team will appear under Mine in the catalog for those team members. Because Cortex integrates with your IDP, every time a new user is added to a team, they'll have access to all relevant services upon logging in for the first time.

Dependencies and resources

Within a service’s home page, you can also see all of its incoming and outgoing dependencies, including the resources operating behind that service. 

Clicking any of these resources or services automatically takes you to that entity's page.

Subscribing to service groups

Services appear under Mine if you are associated with its ownership in some way, but you can also populate additional services you're interested in following by subscribing to a service group.

To subscribe to a service group, navigate to My Preferences and then User Preferences to find Group subscriptions.

You have the ability to subscribe to any service tag. For example, you could add any services related to billing into your catalog.

After subscribing to a group, you’ll see any services related to your selection appear within your catalog. Subscribing to a group won't tag you as an owner, so you don't have to worry about being paged if there's an incident.

Scorecards and initiatives

Service ownership drives a lot of the personalization available in Cortex. It determines not only which services appear as Mine, but will automatically filter scorecards accordingly. This way, you're initially presented with scorecards relevant to your services, but you can select All at any time to see all of the scorecards that belong to your organization.

The Cortex Slack bot will notify any owners and team members when this information is updated, including any changes to the scorecard and weekly service performance reports. 

Subscribed users and additional team members will also see their scorecards and action items driven by ownership in the same way, and will likewise receive Slack notifications.

Additional users

Cortex gives you the ability to add additional users into your teams. Additional users’ functionality is similar to subscribed users. Additional team members will see those services appear as Mine, and will likewise see relevant scorecards and action items, but will not be tagged as owners.