Take the guesswork out of ownership by clearly and easily tying
        owners to associated permissions and roles.

Solve ownership

Understand what’s really going on in your tech ecosystem with
        intuitive reporting, so that you can help your engineers move
        faster.

Improve visibility and decision-making

Help your developers deliver code they are proud of by baking in
        standards and best practices.

Drive best practices

Knock down knowledge silos and learn from anyone in or outside your
        organization. Our plugins help make learning more accessible and
        mainstream.

Facilitate collaboration and learning

Release notes

Documentation

FAQs

Installation

Spotify Plugins for Backstage is a bundle of  premium plugins designed to bring even more of Spotify’s maturity with Backstage to our adopters.
Built by our developers — for your developers — this bundle of plugins puts humans at the center of developer experience and accelerates your Backstage goals.

Spotify Plugins for Backstage

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

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 Pulse homepage provides key details about the survey methodology, process, and results data. From here, administrators can create new surveys, participants can take surveys, and anyone can view survey results.


The Pulse plugin takes care of the heavy lifting for survey creation and provides a straightforward template that allows a survey administrator or set of administrators to launch a survey in seconds.


Configure a survey

The Pulse question set takes a few minutes to complete and is entirely integrated into the participants’ existing Backstage workflow, which means you’re more likely to get the feedback you need.


Take a survey

Pulse survey results show and visualize trends over time for core R&D metrics like productivity and satisfaction, and can help teams across your organization prioritize initiatives that speed up R&D.


Results

Pulse is an R&D survey framework that lets you track key productivity and satisfaction metrics,
analyze anonymized response data, and visualize trends — all within Backstage. Collect the data
you need to drive continuous improvements to your R&D tooling, processes, and culture — and ship
code faster.


Pulse

Collect data that drives continuous improvements to your R&D tooling, processes, and culture

We've carefully crafted Pulse questions alongside a group of experts in the field of
engineering productivity and satisfaction, and through our years of experience running
internal developer surveys. Pulse focuses on the concerns of your tech community, covering
blind spots that general HR surveys might miss.


Questions designed by experts

Pulse helps you put real values to key engineering metrics like productivity, satisfaction,
and flow. Ground your conversations in data to help improve your engineering experience.


Measure R&D productivity

Pulse visualizes anonymized survey results, so that you can benchmark performance over time,
identify trends, and understand where your developers face bottlenecks. Use these insights to
drive improvements in R&D tools and ship faster.


Identify opportunities to ship faster

Spotify Plugins for Backstage is a bundle subscription — made with love at Spotify — for Backstage adopters to accelerate their developer experience goals.

Spotify Plugins for Backstage
Beta

Meet the plugins

Soundcheck

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Skill Exchange

Insights

Pulse

What do the plugins do?

Additional information

Want to learn more? Book a demo

Spotify Plugins for BackstageBeta

Meet the plugins

Soundcheck

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Skill Exchange

Insights

Pulse

What do the plugins do?

Additional information

Want to learn more? Book a demo

Spotify Plugins for Backstage
Beta