Soundcheck
Overview
Soundcheck measures and provides incentives to improve the quality, reliability, and alignment of your software ecosystem. With Soundcheck, engineering organizations define development and operational standards and then use those standards to measure the health of their software components. Soundcheck provides teams with strong guidance to cultivate behavior and improve an organization's DevOps practices. Use Soundcheck to prioritize and visualize tech health and alignment to organizational best practices within Portal.
There are 5 fundamental elements that make up Soundcheck:
- Check: A standard or best practice a component is graded against.
- Check Result: The result of running a check against a component. Results are either pass or fail.
- Track: A long-term tech health initiative.
- Level: A group of checks that represent a milestone within a track.
- Certification: The outcome of passing all checks within a level.
Together, they show you how any given software component is performing against your organization's long-term tech health initiatives.
Find out more in the Soundcheck plugin documentation.
Getting started
Enabling Soundcheck
You can enable Soundcheck in Portal by following the steps outlined in the Setup Guide. You also have the option to enable or disable Soundcheck at any time through the Config Manager.
Pre-Loaded Checks and Tracks
To help get you started, Soundcheck comes with a set of pre-loaded checks and tracks similar to those used at Spotify.
These checks and tracks are intended to be a starting point for you to build upon and customize to fit your organization's needs. They can be modified or deleted as needed, or keep them as they are!
You can view and manage these checks and tracks by going to Soundcheck > Checks and Soundcheck > Tracks respectively.
Pre Loaded Checks:
Pre Loaded Tracks:
Enabling Fact Collectors
Soundcheck within Portal comes with 2 fact collectors, GitHub and SCM, which are used to collect facts for use with checks. They are both disabled by default, but are needed to power the pre-loaded checks and tracks included with Soundcheck. To enable these two collectors, follow the steps below.
GitHub Fact Collector
To enable the GitHub fact collector, go to Soundcheck > Collectors > Github and click the "Configure" button (/soundcheck/collectors/github).
Here you can choose which facts to collect, how often to collect them, for which entities the facts should be collected, and if those facts should be stored in cache and for how long.
SCM Fact Collector
The SCM fact collector cannot yet be configured the way the GitHub fact collector can via a UI within Soundcheck itself, and so must be configured directly in Portal's 'Config Manager'. There are two ways to configure the SCM fact collector, via a remote URL that hosts a configuration file or by configuring the settings directly through the 'Config Manager'.
To configure the SCM Fact Collector via a config file hosted at a URL (github/gitlab/bitbucket etc.),
go to Config Manager > Soundcheck and enter the URL for the configuration file, under soundcheck.collectors.scm.url.
Soundcheck will pull the configuration file from the URL and use it to configure the SCM Fact Collector:
To configure the SCM Fact Collector directly through the 'Config Manager', go to Config Manager > Soundcheck and select the configuration option that does not require a URL
(above, 'Option 1' is the URL configuration, select 'Option 2' for direct configuration).
There, you can enter the configuration settings for the SCM Fact Collector directly.
For both of the above options, follow the documentation on Soundcheck - Configuring Fact Collectors to create proper configurations for the SCM Fact Collector.
Creating new or modifying Checks and Tracks
Checks
Find out more in the Soundcheck plugin documentation - Checks - Managing checks via the no-code UI.
Tracks
Find out more in the Soundcheck plugin documentation - Tracks - Managing checks via the no-code UI.