What is a Service Catalog?
A Service Catalog is a detailed list of the technical services (enterprise applications, task-specific tools, microservices, and so on) used by your organization both internally and externally. A robust Service Catalog enables you to refer to one location for data about services, including integration information, terms of use, and provisioning. Your Service Catalog may include services built internally by your team, services from external organizations that are integrated with your system, and hybrid services with different components bundled together. Cataloging—and tracking changes to—all of the services within your system can become a complex and time-consuming project as your organization grows. Even the best Service Catalogs need to be carefully maintained and updated.
FireHydrant’s Service Catalog provides a streamlined way to describe and update all of your services. Our Service Catalog configuration options, including the ability to ingest services and service metadata from third party systems, make it easy to set up a detailed record of all your services and to refresh data about each service automatically.
A major benefit of maintaining your Service Catalog in FireHydrant is that it enables you to track which services are affected by a specific incident. With this information, you can customize how you respond to incidents based on the services impacted.
Service catalog categories
Within FireHydrant, your Service Catalog is divided into four main categories:
- Services
- Functionalities
- Environments
- Change events
By detailing different services, functionalities, environments, and change events, you create a way to track your digital properties. When these properties are well-catalogued, you can quickly figure out where an incident is occurring.
Adding Services
A service is a collection of functions that performs a targeted business operation. A service can be a microservice, a mono-repository, or a library that you maintain. You can add services manually or ingest them into your service catalog.
Adding services manually
To manually add services:
- In the left-hand panel of FireHydrant, click Integrations > Services, and click +Create service. (Or go to https://app.firehydrant.io/services.)
- From here, add a service by filling out the service Name (required) and Description (optional).
- Add Labels (key-value pairs) to support filtering.
Ingesting services automatically
As an alternative to adding services manually, you can populate your service catalog by ingesting multiple services and their associated details. To get started, click Service catalog > Services. Then click Catalog Settings. For details on the rest of the process, read our article about service ingestion.
Other tools available for importing services
- Opsgenie or PagerDuty
- Kubernetes
- Terraform (can also provision team ownership of services)
- Github
- API
Adding Functionalities
A functionality (function) is a programming construct that performs a specific task. Functionalities let you associate backend services with the features your end users interact with.
To create and manage functionalities:
- In the left-hand panel of FireHydrant, click Integrations > Functionalities > + Create functionality.
- Add a functionality by filling out the functionality Name (required) and Description (optional).
- Link any services within your system that you may have included with the given functionality.
Adding Environments
Environments let you break up your app by region (for example, "US East 1") or development stage (for example, "Production").
To create and manage environments:
- In the left-hand panel of FireHydrant, click Integrations > Environments and click +Create environment. (Or go to https://app.firehydrant.io/environments.)
- From here, add an environment by filling out the service Name (required) and Description (optional).
