Feature Friday: Using Entity Relationship Types to Map the Perfect March Madness Bracket

Can an EngOps Platform help you win your family March Madness pool? 🏆

It’s that time of year again, and the stakes are high. Despite watching hundreds of hours of basketball, we're tired of losing bets to a mom who barely follows the sport. This year, we’re leveling the playing field using Cortex.

In this #FeatureFriday, we’re moving beyond microservices to show you the power of Entity Relationship Types. Watch as we take a chaotic tournament bracket and turn it into a structured, navigable engineering ecosystem.

🔍 What’s inside:
The "Mom Madness" Problem: Why gut feeling isn't enough when you're betting against Mom.

Defining Custom Entities: Creating a "March Madness" entity type to house every team and matchup.

Mapping the Bracket: Building a functional hierarchy using Relationship Types to navigate every round of the tournament.

Analyzing the Data: Using the Birdseye Report to group Scorecards by relationship, identifying exactly where last year's picks went wrong.

The Bottom Line: If you can map a complex tournament bracket and score it for accuracy in Cortex, you can map your entire engineering ecosystem. Whether it's microservices, APIs, or basketball teams—if you can define the relationship, you can master the data.

📽️ Video Chapters:

0:00 The "Mom Madness" Problem 🏀

0:45 Defining the Future: Custom Entity Types

1:05 Setting up Entity Relationship Types

1:28 Building the Bracket Hierarchy

1:45 Scorecards: Analyzing Last Year’s Fails

2:10 The Birdseye View: Grouping by Relationship

2:30 From Brackets to Engineering Ops

🚀 Get Started with Cortex: cortex.io/demo