The entity page provides a comprehensive snapshot of a specific entity's tech health. Identify how compliant an entity is to the best practices set by your team and pinpoint specific areas for improvement.


Entity page

A track is a long-term health initiative. It defines the development and operational standards used to measure the health of a software component. Users can design tracks to create tech health targets in line with your organization's needs.


Tracks

A check is the best practice an entity is graded against. Check results are the outcome of running a check against an entity – either pass or fail. If the check fails, you receive feedback on what caused the failure and guidance on how to pass the check, streamlining the feedback loop.


Checks

Certification is the status of passing all checks within a level. You can view your component's certification on the component page. Completing a certification unlocks a fun surprise! 🎉


Certifications

The overview page provides a grid view of all entities owned by specific groups inside your organization and their current tech health. Identify quickly which entities are compliant to your team's best practices and which ones need improvement.


Overview page

No-Code UI is a powerful user interface built into the Soundcheck plugin that allows users to manage checks and tracks without writing yaml code. Prior to No-Code UI, users had to write yaml code to configure a new check or track. Now, non-programmers can add checks and tracks too.


soundcheck no code UI tracks checks management

No-Code UI for tracks and checks management

The Tech Health page provides a single, aggregated view of metrics and trends that gives teams and leaders the ability to understand the tech health of their components. Users can also export chart and tab data in .csv format from the Tech health pages.


Tech Health

Documentation

FAQs

Installation

The Soundcheck plugin visualizes checks for security, testing, reliability, and other development and operational standards for your software components. Instead of asking your developers to file and respond to yet another ticket, streamline software quality through Soundcheck's clear scorecards, actionable feedback, and positive reinforcement.


Soundcheck

Ensure quality, reliability, and alignment of software development with codified checks and guidance

With Soundcheck, engineering organizations can define development and operational standards, equipping developers with strong guidance and visualization to illustrate how the tech health of their components aligns with their organization's best practices. Take the guesswork out of developing code that aligns to best practices.


Ensure high-quality code

You shouldn't have to work so hard to understand your team's overall tech health. Soundcheck visualizes components' alignment to organizational best practices, so that teams can understand their software ecosystem's tech health at a glance.


Understand the big picture

When owners can easily see the tech health of their components, it incentivizes quality, reliability, and alignment throughout your software ecosystem. Soundcheck encourages and streamlines high-quality and compliant code development.


Cultivate alignment to best practices

Roles make permission decisions in the RBAC plugin. Each role includes a list of members and affiliated permissions. RBAC integrates with Backstage's catalog of users and groups to assign role membership.


Roles

Permissions can be matched to the role by specific permission name, permission properties, or globally. Permissions return policy decisions – either allow, deny or conditional.


Permissions

The RBAC plugin has a condition builder that helps you compose rules corresponding to the permission.


Conditional decisions

The Policy Tester is a powerful feature to simulate your draft and published policies to determine the outcome for specific permissions and roles.

A page showing the policy testing feature. Selection fields for the test criteria (permission and roles) are shown above the results of the test.

Policy tester

After you're done creating a policy, you can publish it. Backstage immediately uses the new policy to make authorization decisions.


Publishing

The RBAC plugin is a no-code management UI for restricting access to plugins, routes, and data
within Backstage. Admins can quickly define roles, assign users and groups, and configure
permissions to encode authorization decisions according to your organization's evolving security
and compliance needs.


Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Control access to actions and data in Backstage with ease

RBAC makes it easy for anyone, not just engineers, to efficiently manage access to resources
and actions in Backstage. With its no-code interface, administrators can easily set up roles
with members and permissions - including complex conditional permissions or those exported
from private plugins.


Simplify access management

The simpler it is to manage role-based access control, the better protected your data will be.
RBAC allows administrators to quickly, flexibly, and easily create, publish, edit, or revert
permission policies to stay up-to-date and compliant with your organization's security needs.


Remain compliant and secure

The Skill Exchange homepage offers search and quick navigation to learning opportunities. The search component allows you to quickly find coworkers with specific skills that can assist you on a project or your learning journey. Or you can explore opportunities to help your coworkers on their learning journeys.


Homepage

Skill Exchange comes with its own skill-centered profile experience. With skill profiles, you categorize, identify, and display skills such as: “I can help with” and “I’m learning.”


Profile

The skill directory is a directory of all the unique combinations of skills that people in your org add to their profiles. You can search across teams to find coworkers that can help you solve a particular problem or find a mentor.


Skill directory

Users can either post an “offering to mentor” or “looking for mentor” details page. Each mentor detail page typically includes contact, location, description, and skill related information.


Mentor

Embeds are short-term work opportunities on other teams. Users can either post or search for embed opportunities. Each embed page typically includes requested skills, description, and contacts.


Embed

Hacks are internal projects driven by developers at a company. Developers typically seek out hacks to grow their skills, work on a passion project, or find folks with similar ideas to collaborate with.


Hack

Skill Exchange is an internal marketplace to promote and seek out unique, on-the-job learning opportunities for your developers and other members of your tech ecosystem. With Skill Exchange, Backstage becomes a hub for custom learning and growth by sharing existing expertise and fostering meaningful collaboration across your organization.


Skill Exchange

Build an internal marketplace for learning and growth opportunities within R&D

Skill Exchange puts employee growth and collaboration at the forefront of the developer experience. Within Backstage, mentors can connect with mentees, teams can connect with temporary help, developers can pair up to program together, and ad hoc teams can assemble to work on hack projects.


Codify growth and connectivity

Talent, knowledge, and experience can often get trapped inside organizational silos. With Skill Exchange, your R&D community can unlock opportunities for collaboration and meaningful connection, no matter where anyone sits in the org chart.


Unlock learnings across your org

Skill Exchange elevates the existing expertise of your current employees, so that your developers and members of your tech org can learn from each other instead of looking and hiring externally. Skill Exchange helps you invest in and develop your current talent.


Elevate existing expertise

Discover exactly what you're looking for with our robust filtering options. Global filters allow you to refine your search based on specific criteria. Choose from a range of period filters, with data available for up to 90 days in the past. You also have the flexibility to customize the date range to suit your needs. These filters apply to all the graphs across every tab, providing a seamless and tailored experience.


Filters

The Daily Active Users chart showcases the trends in Backstage usage by visualizing the number of users who are active on a daily basis. Identify patterns and gain valuable insights into user behavior over time.


Users

Unleash the potential of your most popular entities in the Software Catalog. Identify which entities are being visited the most and leverage these individuals as your champions. They are the key adopters who can inspire and influence the rest of the organization. Take the opportunity to interview these owners and understand the reasons behind their popularity.


Catalog

Track the daily count of searches performed by users. This data provides valuable insights into the popularity and usage of the Backstage Search feature. Use this information to understand if users are actively utilizing the search functionality to discover new content.


Search

Stay informed about your team's Software Templates usage. Track the overall count of template usage, daily trends, and the templates that your team relies on the most. These features are designed to benefit both template owners, who can assess their template's usage, and Backstage admins or champions, who can evaluate the comparative usage of different templates.


Templates

The Insights plugin provides a comprehensive window into Backstage usage at your organization. With advanced filtering and segmentation functionality, you can gain valuable insights into Backstage adoption with the default dimensions like 'User group', 'Entity kind' and 'Lifecycle' or your own custom dimensions that fit your organization. Leverage this information to identify Backstage champions within your organization, detect anomalous trends, and understand user behavior.


Insights

Identify, benchmark, and understand usage trends to drive Backstage adoption

Insights is designed to help you understand how Backstage is being embraced within your organization. Validate your efforts to onboard developers onto your Backstage app and identify areas where you can maximize your impact. Which plugins are driving traction and engagement, and which ones need improvement? With Insights, you can dive deep into your most active plugins, uncover user preferences, and optimize your Backstage experience.


Measure user and plugin adoption

The Insights plugin offers pre-built graphs that allow you to benchmark and compare user behavior data over time. Additionally, you have the flexibility to apply your own filters and date ranges to generate custom dashboards that align with your priorities.


Identify trends

Insights provides a comprehensive view of how Backstage users are actually interacting with your Backstage app. The plugin captures user, search, catalog, and template activities within your organization, eliminating the need for manual setup. Gain a deep understanding of user behavior and evaluate the success of your Backstage initiatives.


Understand user behavior

The plugin shows the current and historical build statuses from CircleCI directly within the Backstage interface. This real-time monitoring enables quick diagnosis and resolution of build-related issues, all without having to leave the Backstage environment.

A list of the most recent CircleCI builds.

Real-time build status

View every step of a CircleCI job directly in the Backstage interface, providing granular insights into each phase of your build process. This feature helps you identify where a job might be failing or encountering issues, facilitating quicker troubleshooting and resolution.

View with high level information about each step's pass/failure state in a job.

Step-by-step job overview

Navigate to a specific build to access its detailed logs right within the Backstage interface. This feature allows you to dive deep into build performance, errors, and other critical information without needing to switch platforms, making debugging more efficient and straightforward.

Detailed build logs

CircleCI homepage

Support

The CircleCI plugin integrates CircleCI data directly into Backstage, offering a unified view for real-time build monitoring and logs. By centralizing build information, the plugin eliminates context-switching, improves productivity, and fosters teamwork, allowing developers to manage builds without leaving Backstage.

CircleCI

Seamlessly integrate CircleCI into Backstage for real-time build monitoring and insights

Stay on top of your CircleCI build processes without ever leaving Backstage. This real-time integration allows developers to see the status of their builds, including failures and successes, thus enabling quicker diagnosis and resolution of issues.

Real-time build monitoring

Bring the power of CircleCI into Backstage to create a one-stop-shop for all your development needs. From code to deployment, keep your workflows streamlined and integrated, reducing the cognitive load for your development team.

Unified developer experience

By centralizing build information in Backstage, teams can more easily share insights, metrics, and statuses. This level of visibility encourages collaboration, as developers can quickly pinpoint bottlenecks, understand workflow dependencies, and coordinate more effectively.

Enhanced collaboration

Provide DORA metrics for Backstage components and groups, giving teams a quick understanding of system health and performance.

In the Group page in Backstage, the Overview tab is selected. The tab has four cards: Developers, Developer Experience, Members, and Ownership. The Developer Experience card shows the Developer Experience Score for that group.

DORA metrics

Embed developer experience data from DX within Backstage group pages, helping make your developer portal the go-to hub for developers and teams.

In the Component page in Backstage, the DX tab is selected. The tab has four graphs: Deployment Frequency, Change Failure Rate, Time to Recovery, and Lead Time.

Developer experience

Leverage the DX back-end schema from within Backstage, allowing you to build custom metrics and insights to power scorecards and reporting.

The DX back-end schema user interface built into Backstage. It has three tabs: Queries, Schema, and Templates. The Schema tab is selected, which opens a SQL editor where users can run database queries.

Flexible building blocks

DX hero image showing three screens from their Backstage plugin.

DX homepage

Skip the hassle of building your own analytics database. DX aggregates data about your services and teams, making it easy to provide metrics and insights within Backstage, including DORA metrics, service insights, developer experience scores, and more.

Enhance your Backstage instance with DORA metrics, developer experience scores, service insights, and more

Build metrics and insights into Backstage in minutes, not months. DX provides dozens of data connectors and APIs to aggregate your SDLC data and quickly stand up the back-end needed to power your Backstage instance.

Save months of engineering effort

Use prebuilt React components to quickly add valuable insights to your developer portal including DORA metrics, service maintainers, developer experience insights, and more. DX components are 100% open-source, letting you contribute and benefit from the community.

Enrich your Backstage experience

Your DX instance is fully isolated and single-tenant with on-prem deployment options, enabling you to meet even the most stringent performance and security needs.

Built for enterprise

Trigger new incidents for your service directly from Backstage. Save time and avoid context switching with this feature.

A modal with an incident form. The form contains just one field, a text box for describing the incident.

Trigger new incident

View all active incidents for a service directly in Backstage.

A card with two tabs: Incidents, which is selected, and Change Events. Incidents has a list of incidents sorted by recency. Each incident has a "triggered" tag, an error message, a timestamp, and an assignee.

See active incidents

Quickly identify who is on-call for a failing service and resolve the incident as fast as possible. With this feature, companies spend more time solving a problem than finding who should solve it.

A card with the current on-call assignee, including their photo, name, and email.

Identify on-call

Add our scaffolder actions to your Backstage Software Templates and enable self-service onboarding for new projects. With one step you can create a service in PagerDuty and configure the plugin automatically on Backstage.

A form that creates a service in PagerDuty. It has three steps to complete: PagerDuty Service, Choose a location, and Review.

Easy service onboarding

A card that represents the PagerDuty plugin. The card has been broken into three sections: a row for actionable buttons, a row for incident-related tabs, and a row for information on the on-call assignee.

PagerDuty homepage

The PagerDuty plugin reduces cognitive load on developers maintaining services in production. Perform various actions from Backstage, such as finding active incidents or opening new ones, viewing recent changes made to the service, and checking who is on-call. Additionally, it enables self-service onboarding through software templates.

PagerDuty

Bring the power of PagerDuty to Backstage, reduce cognitive load, and improve service visibility

The PagerDuty plugin provides visibility into how your services are performing in production and allows you to make changes according to performance all within Backstage.

Improve visibility of your services

Developers are frequently impacted with context switching and cognitive overload. This plugin mitigates the cognitive load on developers by allowing them to run basic incident response tasks directly within Backstage.

Reduce cognitive load

Enable self-service onboarding for new projects by using software templates. Add custom scaffolder action to create services directly in PagerDuty and configure the plugin automatically on Backstage.

Facilitate service onboarding

Display Azure Container Registry details in Backstage. You can see when the container was created and last modified.

Backstage entity view with the "ACR" tab selected. The tab is made up of one card. The title of the card reads "Azure Container Registry Repository: samples/nodetest1". Below the card's title, there is a table with the following columns: "Tag", "Created", "Last Modified", and "Manifest". Several rows of data are present in the table, each row representing an ACR container image.

Details overview

The ACR plugin displays information about your container images available in the Azure Container Registry. The ACR tab in the Backstage UI contains a list of container images and related information.

Container image registry for Azure Container Registry (ACR)

Display information about your container images that are available within the Azure container registry

Azure Image details presented conveniently

List of all the container images with related information from the configured JFrog Artifactory instance.

A list of all versions in a JFrog Artifactory repository named "janus-idp/backstage-showcase".

Container image overview

This is a frontend plugin that enables you to view the information about the container images that are available in your JFrog Artifactory registry. The JFrog Artifactory tab contains a list of container images and related information.

Container image registry for JFrog Artifactory

View container image details from JFrog in Backstage

Seamless integration with Artifactory

Synchronize Keycloak users in a realm, and synchronize Keycloak groups and their users in a realm.

Screenshot of Backstage, showing a user entity with information imported from Keycloak

Synchronization

The Keycloak plugin integrates users and groups from Keycloak with Backstage, enabling use of multiple authentication providers to be applied to Backstage entities. It can synchronize Keycloak users and groups into a realm.

Keycloak

Load users and groups from Keycloak, enabling use of multiple authentication providers to be applied to Backstage entities

Seamless authorization and authentication with Keycloak

Single point of truth for user and group information

On the overview page, you can see an overview of metrics and health by namespace, look at canary information, and see Istio config warnings.

A tab labeled "KIALI" in an example Backstage component entity page. In that page, there is information about the service mesh of a system called "istio-system". There are graphs showing memory and CPU usage over the late 10 minutes. Selectors at the top of the section allow you to select 1. a new type of health check, labelled "Health for", 2. which direction to consider traffic, inbound or outbound, and 3. when to show metrics from, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, etc.

The Kiali plugin exposes information about your entity-specific ServiceMesh objects. A separate Kiali tab displays the overview view associated with a Servicemesh.

Kiali Service Mesh

Configure, visualize, validate and troubleshoot your mesh with Istio

Coherent and integrated visibility into the Service Mesh

Health, metrics and warnings centrally and conveniently located

This page displays a list of clusters and additional information including status, infrastructure provider, associated OpenShift version, and available nodes.

Page shows a table with a list of clusters and their status, infraestructure provider, version, and number of nodes

Multiclusters Page

This page shows the integration between Backstage and the multi-cluster engineers while displaying real-time data from OCM. You can access a variety of consoles from the related links like OpenShift Console, OCM Console, and OpenShift Cluster Manager Console.

A screenshot of a component showing cluster information: status, name and version, as well as links to the console, available CPU cores and nodes and a relations graph.

Cluster information

The Open Cluster Management (OCM) plugin integrates your Backstage instance with the MultiClusterHub and MultiCluster engines of OCM. All clusters represented are discovered and imported into the Backstage Software Catalog. The plugin also shows real-time data from OCM on the Resource entity page.

Open Cluster Management (OCM)

See clusters from Open Cluster Manager’s MulticlusterHub and Multicluster Engine

Clusterwide transparency

Single view status page in real time

Direct console access

The Image Registry tab presents all the relevant information about Quay container images directly. You can see an overview of security scans and severities for each image.

Backstage entity view with the "Image Registry" tab selected. The tab is made up of one card. The title of the card reads "Quay repository: janus-idp/backstage-showcase". Below the card's title, there is a table with the following columns: "Tag", "Last Modified", "Security Scan", "Size", "Expires", and "Manifest". Several rows of data are present in the table, each row representing a Quay container image.

Image Registry tab

The CVE detail page offers a tabulation and display of all known CVE details and severities.

Backstage entity view with the "Image Registry" tab selected. The tab is made up of one card. The title of the card reads "Vulnerabilities for sha256:11c60d22fd". Below the card's title, there is a table with the following columns: "Advisory", "Severity", "Package Name", "Current Version", and "Fixed By". Several rows of data are present in the table, each row representing a vulnerability with the Quay container image that is being viewed.

CVE detail page

The Quay plugin improves the integration and speed of interactions with Quay registries by providing a view into container image details. This includes Common Security Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) associated with deployed images. The vulnerabilities page displays the associated advisory with a link, severity, package name, and current and fixed versions.

Container image registry for Quay

Improve the integration and speed of interactions with Quay registries with a view into container image details

Image security conveniently presented

Complete and comprehensive presentation of risks

Details readily available

A catalog overview page on Backstage with a table with the header "All apis (5)". Filters on the left are "type", "Personal (Owned/ Starred)", "My Company", Owner" and "Lifecycle". The table has five rows with the columns "Name", "System", "Owner", "Type", "Lifecycle", "Description", "Tags", and "Actions". Four rows have the system and owner as "3scale".

Overview

The 3scale plugin synchronizes 3scale content into the Backstage Software Catalog.

3Scale

Synchronize 3scale content into the Backstage Software Catalog

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