Set up your service catalog

Now that your tools are connected to your portal, you can start creating your service catalog and add some users and teams to your organization.

This page will explain some basic concepts and describe the process of onboarding assets to your portal.

Service catalog

Every Port account comes with a set of default blueprints.
Three of these blueprints are designed to help you create a rich and dynamic service catalog:

1. _service
2. _workload
3. _environment

To manually onboard services, workloads and environments, go to the relevant page in the Service catalog page, and click on the + button in the top right corner (for example, + Service in the Services page).

This will create entities, with rich context from the tools you've integrated.

For example:
Say you've integrated GitHub, Jira, and Pagerduty.
When onboarding a service via the + Service button, you will be able to select the relevant GitHub repository, Jira project, and Pagerduty service related to that service.

This will create a single service entity, with relations to the relevant entities you selected, serving as a single component to track & manage the service.

Users & teams

Two other default blueprints are designed to help you manage users, teams, and ownership in your portal:

1. _user
2. _team

To manually onboard users and teams, go to the relvant page in the Organization catalog, and click on the + button in the top right corner (for example, + User in the Users page).

This will create entities, with rich context from the tools you've integrated.

Register your user

First, in the users page, choose Register your user.
This will create a user entity with context of your user accounts in other tools you've integrated.

Now that you've registered your user, some components in your portal will be populated with data.

For example, the table named Track your open pull requests in the Plan my day page is configured to display pull request entities that were opened by the logged in user (in this case, you).
This table should now be populated with PRs from your Git provider.

Register teams

In the teams page, choose Register a new team and select your user as a member.
This will create a team entity and add your user to it.
Now that your user is a member of a team, widgets in the My team page will be populated with data.

Register more users

To see what components in your portal look like with more than one user, register additional users to add them to your Port organization.

If you want to create users without inviting them to the portal just yet, make sure the Invite to Port toggle is disabled when creating the user.

User & team management

The user and team blueprints are powerful components that can be leveraged for many use cases, such as ownership definition, RBAC definition, dynamic visualization, and more.

Read more about them in the User & team management page.

How the service catalog works

As you may have seen, installing an integration will create one or more blueprints, some of which may have a relation to other blueprints.

For example, when installing the PagerDuty integration, the pagerdutyIncident blueprint has a relation to the pagerdutyService blueprint.

Additionally, some of the blueprints will have a relation to one of the default blueprints (e.g. service).

In the PagerDuty example, the pagerdutyIncident blueprint has a relation to the service blueprint.

This results in a rich service component, as these relations give it context from other components in your data model.
You can then use this service component to achieve many use cases, such as:

• Calculate "Mean time to recovery" for a service by adding an aggregation property to it, that will sum the timeToRecovery property of all pagerdutyIncident entities related to it.

• Calculate total monthly incident count for a service by adding an aggregation property to it, that will sum the number of related pagerdutyIncident entities.

• Create visualizations to track incidents, e.g. a chart that shows the number of incidents per service, a table that shows all incidents per service/team, and more.

Relation mapping

To connect integration entities and default component entities, (like the pagerdutyIncident->service relation), we use a rule to find the relevant service entity for each pagerdutyIncident entity.

Read more about relation mapping here.

For example, here is part of the default mapping for the PagerDuty integration.
Note the rule that is used under the service relation, which will find the relevant service entity for each pagerdutyIncident entity:

kind: incidents
selector:
    ...
port:
  entity:
    mappings:
      ...
      relations:
        pagerdutyService: .service.id
        service:
          combinator: '"and"'
          rules:
            - property: '"pagerdutyServiceId"'
              operator: '"="'
              value: .service.id

You can use this method to connect additional components to default components in your data model.

Next step - automatic discovery

Proceed to the next step to learn how to manage your catalog automatically, creating and updating components based on changes in data from your tools.