Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Last week, hundreds of engineering leaders, SREs, platform teams, and developers joined us for Summer Scoop 2025, our biggest launch event yet. The way that we think about our product development at Cortex revolves around all the different types of users who are in our product every day.

In a microservices setup, tracking a single request across services quickly gets complex. One service calls another, then a third, and your logs don’t line up. The traceparent header carries context between services, so all parts of a request connect back to the start. For example, when a frontend sends a request to an API, which then calls a database service, traceparent it links those calls in the trace. Without it, you’re left guessing how requests flow.

Our first turnkey dashboard gives you a real-time pulse on engineering health. Every chart is interactive: click any bar or data point to drill down into the underlying PRs, commits, or incidents. And we’re just getting started; more dashboards are already on the way!

Whether it's ensuring a new service is fully equipped with security scanning, logging, and monitoring from the start, enforcing production readiness checks during deployment, or providing temporary credentials for a production database, Workflows directly support Engineering Excellence Initiatives around modernization and standardization.

In 2025, many companies are reckoning with the true cost of microservices, especially as cloud bills grow and engineering teams face coordination fatigue. The move back to monoliths is gaining traction, particularly for startups and mid-sized businesses who need: ‍

With over 50 built-in integrations, Cortex customers have an always-up-to-date, single interface for their engineering priorities, tools, and tasks. But large organizations have a lot of tools. And if you're running internally hosted tools, or for policy or security reasons would prefer to keep your access tokens private, that used to limit what was possible in your internal developer. Not anymore.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Entity Relationships, a powerful new capability that gives you more flexibility and control over the data model in your IDP. By allowing you to create custom relationships between entities in your catalog, you can model your internal developer portal to accurately reflect your own organization’s taxonomy, letting you better answer deep questions about your environments, releases, packages, and beyond.

Today marks an exciting milestone not just for Cortex, but for every organization looking to foster a culture of engineering excellence. Knowing who owns what is one of the hardest and most important challenges for engineering teams. Without clear ownership, incidents take longer to resolve, migrations stall, and enforcing standards becomes nearly impossible.

If developing scalable, agile applications is a priority for your business, microservices may provide a compelling solution. But what are microservices exactly? The proper microservices definition refers to a modern architectural approach where an application is built as a collection of loosely coupled services. Each service is independent, self-contained, and designed around a specific business capability.

Effective microservices logging requires standardized formats, centralized storage, correlation IDs, and strong security measures. This guide walks you through setup strategies, best practices, and tool recommendations that won't break your budget.