In Cortex, teams can serve as owners for different services within the service and resource catalogs. The Teams feature within Cortex offers a centralized place for the most important information about each team, making it easier for everyone to find what they need.

You can access Teams from the navigation bar.

When you open teams, you'll see Mine and All, which denote teams you belong to and all teams at your organization, respectively. You'll also see Departments and Hierarchy, some advanced features that enable you to simulate your organization chart within Cortex. 

Each team has its own home page, which provides information about what the team does and how to reach them. You can see all of its members, as well as scorecards associated with services and resources owned by that team.

The Links tab contains links to important resources for a team, including onboarding documents and runbooks for current projects.

Under the Services tab, you can see all of the services that a specific team owns, making it easy for other developers to gain insight into another team’s responsibilities.

If a team owns resources, you can find those under the Resources tab.

Leaderboard

The Leaderboard allows everyone to see the ten best performing teams within your organization. You can find the leaderboard by navigating to Teams. 

Cortex will average all scorecard scores for each team to generate ranks by default, but you can use the dropdown to view the leaderboard based on specific scorecards. 

The leaderboard gamifies service and resource quality, and it encourages team members to achieve goals. This creates a culture of accountability, where everyone can see how they’re performing. Plus, it never hurts to inspire a bit of healthy competition between teams.

Ownership

Teams not only allow you to collect vital information in a single place, but are also crucial for ownership. Rather than assign a service or resource to individual team members, you can assign ownership to an entire team. This makes it easy to assign multiple team members to a service or resource, and it ensures that when a team’s composition changes, ownership is updated accordingly.

Creating a team

To create a team, select Create Team next to the search bar.

You have two options for creating a team: Backed by Identity Provider or Managed through Cortex.

Backed by Identity Provider

Backed by Identity Provider is a better option if you have an existing source of truth for your teams and team members, like Okta or Google Groups. By integrating with your identity provider at this stage, Cortex will automatically sync team pages with your source of truth, so you don't have to update information in more than one place when people join or leave teams.

The first step in this flow is selecting the discovered owner group that is associated with the new team — these options will appear in the Select owner section.

Once you select the owner group for your new team, you'll be brought to a page where you can enter additional information about the team. Cortex will automatically fill in some of these fields with information discovered from an identity provider.

Once you've entered the essential Team details, you'll have the opportunity to add Additional members. Additional members typically do not own the entities or act as main points of contact, but are still part of the functional team — this might include managers and designers, for example.

When you select Add additional member, a modal window will open where you can enter the user's name and email address. You also have the option to include a description, which may come in handy if your "user" is a generic account.

You can also add a Slack channels to make it easier for people from other team to contact you if they have questions. Selecting Add Slack channel will open a modal where you can select Slack channels through the Cortex integration.

You can also add links to important resources, like dashboards, documentation, logs, and runbooks, as well as other key information that others should have about your team, like a confluence space or a JIRA project.

Managed through Cortex

Managed through Cortex is a better option if you don't have an identity provider with updated team information — this option allows you to create teams within Cortex. Because teams are important for effective service and resource ownership, it's recommended that you create teams in Cortex even if you don't have a single source of truth for team information.

This process is almost identical to Backed by Identity Provider, but it bypasses the team discovery step and includes a section for adding Core Members. You can select individuals from the Team members from your workplace dropdown, which will include all users that have been added to Cortex.

If a team member has not been added to Cortex yet, you can add them to your team via email by selecting Add email member. 

From there, the rest of the flow is the same: you can add additional members, Slack channels, and links before confirming the team's details.

GitHub teams

Cortex can sync with GitHub teams through the Backed by Identity Provider option. GitHub teams can own services and resources just like any other team in Cortex. 

If there’s no existing team page for a GitHub team, but an entity is tagged as being owned by that team, then Cortex will automatically create a team page for you. 

This will work when any service or resource is tagged as being owned by a team backed by an identity provider. Cortex will automatically create a blank team page with the team’s name and unique identifier. You can leave this page as a placeholder, or you can edit to add more information.