New Catalog UI, certified templates, more tutorials

This month we’re rolling out a huge visual update to the catalog with much more space to get your work done. We’ve also got a bunch of new Tech Insights tutorials to help you improve software across your org.

Catalog

New catalog page preview

You will shortly see a new catalog page roll out on Roadie. This update affects the main software catalog table, and the filters around it.

This new catalog table brings a number of enhancements:

1. More horizontal space for reading the table. We’ve moved the filters to the top so the table is wider.
2. Per user configurable columns. You can customize the table to show the info that’s important to you. We’ll soon be persisting column choice in your browser so you can pick up where you left off (this is coming imminently).
3. Kind specific columns. Groups used to have an owner column and Users were missing Display Name. We’ve tidied these up and introduced more sensible defaults.
4. New table features. Configurable densities and full screen mode make for slicker presentation. Filter highlights make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
5. Persisted filter choices. If you mostly work with Templates, we’ll keep you on the template page when you navigate away and back.
6. Sharable filter choices. Filters will be in the URL so you can share a link to a specific subset of data.

All this is building up to the ability to bring Tech Insights data front and centre in the catalog. We want to show scorecards in a column so you can drive more action around important migrations and software quality issues. More on this in the coming weeks and months.

Fixed: Disappearing Azure repos entities

We spent 3 weeks tracking down and fixing a tricky bug that would cause Entities discovered from Azure Repos to periodically and temporarily disappear from the catalog.

This is demonstrated by the wigglyness of the entities count before the fix, compared to how flat it is after.

It turns out the Azure APIs don’t return consistent results unless a sort is specified on the queries. Here’s the upstream fix we made to Backstage.

This is a really good example of the value Roadie adds. Are bugs like this how you want your Developer Experience team spending their time?

Tech Insights

Group check data by owner

Check results are now grouped by owner as well as by Component. This makes it easier to track down the team who own the most Components which are failing the check.

We’re currently working to expand this to scorecards, and to aggregate the data up and down the hierarchy of teams, so you can view it at any level.

New tutorials

We added 4 Tech Insights tutorials this month. Learn how to…

1. Find software that doesn’t have a valid CODEOWNERS file.
2. Find software that doesn’t have branch protection enabled.
3. Connect Tech Insights to SonarCloud to collect security hotspot data.
4. Connect Tech Insights to an on-prem SonarQube instance.

Bug fixes and improvements

• We fixed a bug where some Data Sources would fail with an Out of Memory error.
• We now support the YAML content type response when sending HTTP requests in Data Sources.
• Data Sources can now send POST requests for GraphQL APIs and other use cases.
• We rolled out a new version of our broker to patch a security vulnerability.

Scaffolder

Certified label for scaffolder templates

You can now add the Certified label to scaffolder templates to designate them as Platform Team approved and ready for use.

Just add the certified annotation to make this work.

apiVersion: scaffolder.backstage.io/v1beta3
kind: Template
metadata:
  name: my-template
  annotations:
    roadie.io/certified: "true"

Bug fixes and improvements

• The scaffolder now supports a task to open a pull request against Azure repos.
• We updated our scaffolder docs page to include more examples and APIs.