Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I'm excited to share that we're launching Braintrust by Cortex, a podcast I've been wanting to create for a while now. After years of building Cortex and working with engineering leaders across industries, I’ve noticed an opportunity for conversations that dig deeper into the daily work of building great engineering teams.

At Cortex, our mission is to empower engineering organizations to ship reliable, secure, and efficient software, faster. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a formalized partnership with Sonar, the leader in code quality and security. For years, Sonar has been one of the most popular integrations in Cortex. Teams rely on Sonar’s deep code insights to identify vulnerabilities, ensure coverage, and raise the bar for clean, secure code.

If you're anything like your peers, you probably blinked in April and found yourself a month away from Black Friday when you opened your eyes. Much like a shopper desperately scrambling to pull together gift lists for their loved ones, many engineering teams find themselves rushing to ensure their systems can handle the biggest shopping day of the year.

Platform teams handle cluster provisioning manually because it requires oversight. A product team needs a cluster, so they submit a request. Someone reviews the configuration, provisions it through the cloud provider, waits for it to spin up, and sends back access details. Two days later, the cluster is ready. The delay is intentional. Without review, teams provision oversized clusters that blow budgets, misconfigure networking, or deploy in the wrong regions.

Two weeks ago, we hosted IDPCON 2025, and the response has been overwhelming. Over 250 engineering leaders from 20+ countries joined us for 12 sessions featuring speakers from Canva, Skyscanner, Blackstone, and more. Attendees participated in discussions at 20+ roundtables, sharing strategies and challenges around engineering excellence and internal developer portals.

Today's Recipe: Vibe-coding an identity-provider integration for Cortex.

In an era of unprecedented change, the role of an engineering leader has never been more demanding. Yesterday’s priority was scaling teams, while today’s is twofold: deploying AI responsibly and measuring the true impact of it all. The challenges are immense, and for the first time in a long time, the playbook is being written in real-time. That’s why today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of Braintrust, a new community from Cortex.

Rolling out a powerful AI tool like GitHub Copilot is a big win for any engineering leader. But because it’s such a significant investment, leadership will inevitably ask if it was worth the cost. Until now, answering this was nearly impossible. While GitHub provides adoption stats, connecting that data to real-world performance metrics like cycle time or code quality has been a manual, frustrating process. We built the Cortex AI Impact Dashboard to provide a clear answer.

Every engineering organization measures success differently. A dashboard that’s perfect for one team might be meaningless for another. While out-of-the-box views for DORA are a great starting point, leaders need the ability to define and share the specific combination of metrics that matter most to their business. Without this, you're either forcing your teams to conform to generic reports or wasting time rebuilding the same views every week.

You see MTTR creeping up, but you don’t know why. You could ask your teams, but that means meetings, pulling people off projects, and waiting days for answers. What if you could just…ask? We’re excited to introduce the new strategic AI chief of staff for engineering leadership, powered by the Cortex MCP. By connecting your Engineering Intelligence data with your scorecards and standards, the MCP allows you to have a strategic conversation about your organization’s performance.