Service Catalog: Simplifying Service Management and Ownership

With the adoption of cloud and microservices, modern IT infrastructures operate with a mesh of services that cater to multiple user requirements. It can get very difficult to simultaneously keep track of numerous services. A Service Catalog helps organize service-related information in a single pane, achieve end-to-end service ownership and get real-time performance insights. In this blog, we will explore services' visibility, classification and reliability and understand how it helps you in better visibility of your services.

Introduction to Service Catalog

At Squadcast, we value the need for hassle-free incident management and operational efficiency. Keeping that in mind, we have revamped our Service Catalog to improve the visibility, classification and reliability of services based on the incident impact. It is more of a Service Directory that helps standardize, arrange, select and monitor an organization’s IT services.

Service Catalog is useful in:

• Making on-call less stressful by providing a single pane view with context around services, ownership, open incidents and dependencies.
• Providing a consolidated summary of all active services in a single dashboard with a high-level view of reliability metrics across teams and services.
• Assessing service health and visualizing real-time reliability metrics such as MTTA & MTTR, incident count, etc.
• Fostering a good engineering culture by improving visibility into ownership of services & microservices. Ensuring greater accountability for service degradation by enabling individuals and teams to actually “own” the services.
• Democratizing service discovery by classifying impacted services based on their severity, affected environment, etc.

Service Catalog for end-to-end Service Management

One Dashboard to Track All Services

Service Catalog offers a centralized dashboard, which is simple to use and provides a detailed view of the organization's services and incidents. Users can get a bird's eye view of metrics like Service name, associated alert sources and extensions, ownership details, escalation policies, incident details, reliability metrics and health status of incidents. Users can even drill down further for more information with just a click.

Alert Sources and Extensions

With ALERT SOURCE or EXTENSION, users can get information about that particular service’s associated alert sources and extensions. Track information about recent incidents and the automation statistics associated with the incidents.

Improved Service Ownership and Escalation Tracking

The Service Catalog helps drive ownership and improve accountability by assigning the right owners to your Services. These owners can be individuals or can be a group/team. For example, an individual or an entire team can own a backend service. The dashboard also shows the associated escalation policy (to whom the incident is assigned/escalated to). Thisinformation can help save valuable time in critical situations.

Intuitive Classification of Services Based on Tags

Services can be catalogued using tags. Users have the option to create their on custom tags suitable for their needs. We recommend and internally use tags based on Type, Impact and Environment:

• Type: You can tag the service based on the type, either a technical service or a business service.
• Impact: This tag explains what is the level of impact an incident can have on the business, severe, critical, etc.
• Environment: In what environment does the service reside, whether it is a production or a development environment etc?

These tags not only help in better service classification, but also in making incident notifications context-rich. With the latest revamp, every team member will have clarity on the incident impact and the configuration that drives their on-call setup, establishing the foundation to make better decisions in stressful situations.

An accurate snapshot of Service health

The Service Catalog offers an accurate assessment of service health. Get information about how many incidents are open and how many have been acknowledged. Also, visualize real-time metrics like Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR) and Mean Time To Acknowledge(MTTA).

This information is crucial during a major outage when multiple services get affected simultaneously. This helps in saving valuable time by accessing all the information such as the list of services affected, the open incidents and their respective owners in one centralized location. This is particularly useful when triaging business-impacting incidents and when getting help is your top priority.

Conclusion

What makes Service Catalog so useful is it offers teams a centralized dashboard that provides a detailed service overview in one place. It supports effortless tracking of important alert sources and extensions. Users can enjoy improved ownership of services and keep track of escalation policies. Monitor reliability metrics and ensure an efficient incident response.

To improve the reliability of services and promote service ownership by configuring your services using Squadcast’s service catalogue.

‍

Squadcast is an incident management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications and integrate with popular ChatOps tools. Work in collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and use automation to eliminate toil.