You may have over a hundred repositories in GitHub, and at this point, you have likely imported all of them into Cortex. With this much information, though, it can be difficult to be know at a glance that all repositories are accounted for and new projects are being imported into and tracked within Cortex.

The discovery audit guarantees confidence in your Catalog by listing all changes that Cortex has detected in your world. Cortex compares everything that exists within the system to what it discovers within your Git tool, APM tool, Kubernetes cluster, and other crucial integrations, so you have insight into all of the changes happening within all of your environments.

You can find Discovery Audit under Tools.

Under Discovered, you’ll see a full list of detected changes, so you can easily see what updates need to be reflected within Cortex.

The first few times you use the discovery audit, there may be a lot of events to review. To make things easier, you can search or filter the list by integration to focus on the highest priority changes.

Importing and removing services

Cortex will note whether a service, resource, or repository has been discovered, archived, or deleted. From this page, you can easily import or remove entities to reflect these changes within your catalogs.

If Cortex detects a new service or resource, you can import it directly from this page. Select the + (plus) icon to go directly to the service or resource import flow.

If Cortex detects that a service has disappeared, you also have the ability to delete that service, resource, or repository directly from this page by selecting the trash can icon. This will open a modal window with the service(s) that will be impacted.

This allows you to delete all of the services that are associated with a specific repository in bulk (provided multiple services point to that repository). This window gives you the opportunity to review all potentially impacted services before deleting, so you don’t unintentionally remove something from Cortex.

Ignoring events

If an event appears within the discovery audit, but it is irrelevant — for example, a test project that doesn’t need to be imported into Cortex — you also have the ability to ignore it. To ignore an event, click the closed eye icon next to the add/remove function.

The ignore action is persistent, so the event won’t appear again within the discovery audit. Although ignoring is persistent, it’s not permanent — you can view ignored events and unignore them at any time under the Ignored tab in the menu bar. Select the open eye icon next to an event to return it to the Discovered list.

At first, there may be a lot of discoveries to sort through, so you may find yourself ignoring quite a few events. As time goes on and as your team maintains the catalogs, there will be fewer changes that appear within the discovery audit, so you’ll want to pay attention to those that do.

The discovery audit allows you to stay on top of everything that’s happening in your world, giving your engineers the utmost confidence in the Catalog.