Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In 2024, there’s no shortage of tools to help engineering teams track team health, productivity, or efficiency. But the problem with those solutions has been two-fold. First, most only track “output” metrics, with no insight into what’s causing teams to ship slower, or resolve fewer incidents. Second, these tools lack flexibility in data inputs and metric definitions, preventing teams from building their own unique measures of excellence.

Engineering teams are always shipping something—new services, resources, models, clusters, etc. You probably have a set of standards you expect developers to abide by when doing that work, like adequate testing, code coverage, resolution of outstanding vulnerabilities, etc. But how are you actually tracking and enforcing those standards? Without an Internal Developer Portal, you might find that to be an incredibly manual effort.

This month marks a huge milestone for us at Cortex. We’re excited to announce that ServiceNow, the global leader in digital workflows, has invested in our Series C funding round. Together, we’re pushing forward with our mission to unify tech operations at the enterprise through our industry-leading Internal Developer Portal (IDP).

Let’s be honest: platform engineering is evolving fast, and a lot of teams are being forced to write the rules while still collecting context. Plenty of terms and topics are still up for debate—from, “Is this just DevOps 2.0?” to “How much abstraction is too much?" In this blog we pulled together 10 of the biggest topics being debated today. While we may not have all the answers, we think just getting up to speed on what's left to decide helps all of us get better.

The most time-consuming part of incident resolution is a data problem. Who owns this service? What's it made of? What are the dependencies? Where are the run books? Learn how Cortex cuts incident response time and prevents new issues with up-to-date ownership, reliable runbooks, and Scorecards that drive continuous improvement.

Code, deploy, repeat. As a developer, your days are a whirlwind of Git commits, pull requests, and CI/CD pipelines. In the rush to ship new features and hit those sprint goals, it's easy to overlook the less glamorous aspects of software maintenance. But one often-neglected practice could be the difference between a stable, secure system and a compromised system. Enter patch management, a key DevOps tool in your arsenal to safeguard your systems.

I was recently cruising LinkedIn and saw Abi Noda from GetDX reference a paper Meta wrote in 2022 on improving code review time. Meta’s focus on this metric was sparked by a developer survey, but what they did as a result is even more interesting (at least to me!). Meta developed a “NudgeBot” to alert reviewers to take action on stale diffs. And it worked; both time to review and time in review went down.

Measuring progress in software development is hard. Our industry is defined by complexity, entropy, shifting deadlines and priorities, and customer expectations that evolve almost as quickly as the technology that we use every day. The nature of this environment means that we need to apply continuous feedback loops, robust frameworks and structured approaches to do good work.

As a CIO or IT leader, the need for speed and efficiency is always in tension with governance and compliance requirements. Sounds all too familiar – the frustration of slow incident resolution, outdated ownership records and resistance from engineering teams. You’ve sunk significant time and effort into implementing your ITSM platforms (such as ServiceNow), yet you struggle with buy-in and adoption from engineering teams. They can’t afford to be throttled any further.