Hey there! Last year, we introduced Catalog—the ultimate connected map of everything within your organization.
Catalog was designed to address a major pain point in incident response: understanding the context of issues and their relevance within your organization. The primary objective of Catalog was to assist responders in swiftly addressing critical questions like:
- Which team is responsible for the service behind the checkout page?
- Who needs to be involved in case our primary database goes down?
- How can I communicate with customers affected by this issue?
Without this clear context, responders would be lost in a sea of confusion, wasting precious time and potentially exacerbating the situation by engaging with the wrong individuals or attempting to solve the wrong problems.
As we contemplated our next steps, it became evident that we didn’t want to just create another service catalog.
While service catalogs serve an essential function in many engineering teams, our customers expressed that the rigid structure they impose clashed with the flexibility they required. This led to conformity issues, manual workarounds, and limited reporting capabilities. Many customers resorted to labeling a Team as a Service or utilizing a Description field to store Tags, Identifiers, or extra details.
Our goal was to ensure that Catalog encompassed all pertinent business context—teams, services, customers, infrastructure, and more—without assuming anything about your organizational framework. With this context, incident management and response are transformed since you have a dynamic, integrated, and comprehensive view of your organization.
Throughout the past year, we’ve been diligently working behind the scenes to elevate this experience from merely being “the connected map” to “the contextual engine driving automation across your entire organization.”
Now, let’s delve into the latest updates for Catalog…
What’s New
We’ve dedicated extensive efforts to enhance Catalog’s functionality. From introducing AI-powered features to expedite the creation of a Catalog, to enabling the management of any Catalog configuration with code and seamless integration with existing infrastructure tools.
We’ve also added new integrations, extended the capabilities of current integrations, and streamlined user and team modeling within Catalog.
Throughout these changes, we’ve adhered to four key principles:
- Integrate data from any source system: Unlike traditional service catalogs that confine your data to a predefined model, we empower you to bring in any data, structure it your way, and bid farewell to using “description” fields for tags or identifiers.
- Build quickly with AI: Establishing a source of truth can be challenging, which is why we leverage AI to suggest values, establish connections between catalog types, and simplify Catalog building. Once you’re content, you can manage future updates through code.
- Not another source of truth: We understand the importance of not adding complexity or another “source of truth” to your stack. Hence, we seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, enriching them by linking Users and Teams or Customers and Features.
- No vendor lock-in: We offer multiple data synchronization methods into Catalog. With Catalog Exporter, you can extract data into any system of your choice, seamlessly integrating with your external solutions.
It’s safe to say we’ve been extremely busy enhancing Catalog’s usability and power to assist you in refining your incident response.
With these enhancements, we’ve expanded the array of functionalities available to our customers through Catalog, transitioning from a limited selection of themes focusing on “what” and “who” to a robust set of automations driven by Catalog:
- Automatically populate incident metadata: New services added to your service catalog automatically update custom fields and maintain ownership details.
- Attribute and route alerts: Alerts triggered from your data pipeline can be escalated to your Data Infrastructure team as the service owners.
- Simplify incident declaration: Allow your Customer Support team to select familiar features instead of technical services when declaring incidents, with Catalog establishing all necessary connections in the background.
- Bring business context to incidents: Share essential customer information from Salesforce and other CRMs in the incident channel.
- Explore insights by team: Quickly assess your team’s incident workload and outstanding follow-ups.
- Get the right people involved: Notify leadership of critical incidents and add relevant individuals to the incident channel.
- Automatically export follow-ups: Track next steps by exporting follow-ups to the responsible team’s issue tracker.
- Keep customers informed: Update customers about the impact of incidents on the products they use.
- Identify team membership easily: Utilize existing data from Google Groups or Okta to maintain up-to-date team information.
What Customers Are Saying
Catalog enables our customers to consolidate their organizational context, including teams, software services, and business domains, in one centralized location. By establishing connections between entities, incidents can be fully contextualized, and powerful automations can be unlocked.
We’ve received an overwhelming response to our Catalog updates over the past year. Leading the charge is Netflix, where Hank Jacobs (Staff SRE) and his team are truly pushing the boundaries of what’s achievable.
“The ability to incorporate Netflix-specific context into the tool—Netflixisms, service names, and similar elements—and have them displayed in the product was a pivotal moment for us, something that no other vendor has provided.”
Understanding how thousands of users manage incidents at scale is a complex task. However, by establishing a hierarchical mapping from incident.io users to specific engineering teams and services using Catalog, Netflix can easily identify the teams and organizations reporting and addressing incidents affecting their services, streamlining the resolution process.
“It has enabled us to implement better automation. We’ve implemented scenarios where an alert triggers, automatically creating an incident with the appropriate field set using Catalog that aligns with our systems. Through this, we can integrate with internal systems to flag incidents impacting developers.”
For Netflix, the cherry on top is the Catalog Importer, which allows them to synchronize data from any source into Catalog.
“We utilize the Catalog Importer to sync all our services into incident.io. This provides a field that always reflects the services within the Netflix ecosystem. As teams create incidents, they can attribute the incident to one or more services contributing to or impacted by the issue.”
What’s Next
There’s so much more in store for Catalog, and we’re thrilled about the upcoming developments. To discover how you can leverage Catalog, visit incident.io/catalog.
If you’re a customer, reach out to us via your Slack Connect channel to explore the powerful new features and get started.
If you’re not currently a customer but intrigued by the latest Catalog updates, schedule a demo with us to learn more.
What We Built
Alright, you’ve come this far, so it’s time to delve into what we’ve rolled out for Catalog over the past 12 months. In essence, a plethora of functionalities have been added to expedite our customers’ initial setup with AI, bring in more data, and expand their catalog with incident.io.
We’re incredibly proud of the strides we’ve made!
Building with AI
Suggested values
We’ve expanded our AI product suite with a new feature that allows you to quickly Build your Catalog with AI. This enhancement leverages AI to provide catalog suggestions, enabling you to efficiently create or update catalog types.
Instead of manually inputting details like Slack channels for each team, our AI can accomplish the task in seconds, saving you time and effort.
Bulk editing
Complementing our AI-driven Catalog creation, we’ve introduced a robust bulk editing feature. Particularly beneficial when setting up a Catalog for the first time, this feature allows you to populate entire columns at once, significantly saving time.
Getting Started Quickly
Teams
We’ve streamlined the process of Setting up your Teams in Catalog, making it effortless to establish a strong foundation with just a few clicks. Within minutes, you can have your catalog configured, along with custom fields to kickstart your incident.io setup.
P.S. We’ve also introduced a similar flow for Services, so be sure to explore that too.
Categories
Catalog types can now be categorized, making it simpler to locate specific items.
