Service Detection

Learn how OpsLevel makes it easy to populate your software catalog.

This guide will walk you through how you can automatically populate your software catalog using OpsLevel's integrations; however, there are many ways to populate and maintain your catalog in OpsLevel:

Detecting Services from Integrations

When you add a new Git, Alert Source, Deploy, or Custom Event Check integration, OpsLevel will recommend services automatically. Git repositories will be scanned and services will be inferred from the contents. Datadog monitors and services from Pagerduty, New Relic and OpsGenie will generate recommendations.

When we receive payloads from Deploy and Custom Event Check Integrations we will also recommend services from the aliases we find. For all of these integrations, if there is no exact alias match in the service catalog, we will attempt to find a close match for an existing service in the catalog and recommend we Merge the sources onto the service. Otherwise, we'll recommend you Register a new service and attach the sources to the new service.

When new services are detected, the Service Show page will include a badge on the Detected Services button.

Detected Services button

Detected Services button

You can also go directly to the page from the Catalog > Detected Services item in the navigation menu. Once on the Detected Services page, you will see a list of Pending Services that OpsLevel has detected from your repositories and alert sources. From this list, you can see the Service alias identified during the detection process, where the Service was detected from, and when the Service was detected. When more than one repository or alert source suggestion identifies a service with the same service alias, they will be merged into a single suggestion. You can use the + expand button to see each of the repositories, alert sources, and events that support this Detected Service.

Detected Services tab

Detected Services tab

Review the suggestions and make any changes to the action or service name. The actions are:

  • Register - Make a new service and attach the associated sources.
  • Merge - Attach the sources to the existing service .

If you see a Recommended Service or Services you do not want to be added to your Service Catalog, you can ignore them by selecting the Service(s) and clicking Ignore from either the Actions column or the Bulk Actions dropdown.

Ownership Suggestions

OpsLevel also helps you by providing suggestions for teams that might own your service. For each of the suggestions that are populated from repositories, OpsLevel will pull the recent commit history looking for contributors. If any contributors match existing users in OpsLevel, the teams they are members of will be automatically suggested to you.

Selecting a suggested owner when accepting services

Selecting a suggested owner when accepting services

If multiple contributors are found, we'll aggregate their contributions together so you can see them at a glance. Hover over the icon next to a suggested owner and it will show you a breakdown of contributions that roll up into the team.

A breakdown of the users in OpsLevel who have committed to this repository

A breakdown of the users in OpsLevel who have committed to this repository

Auditing and Unignoring Detected Services

Any action you take is recorded to help you audit events created from suggestions in the Recent Activities tab.

Recent Activities list

Recent Activities list

If you've accidentally ignored a Recommended Service, you can add them back to the Pending Services list. Selecting Ignored from the Status dropdown will display all of the Recommended Services set to Ignore. You can add these Services back to the Pending Services list by selecting the Service(s) and clicking Unignore from either the Actions column or the Bulk Actions dropdown.

Unignore Service Recommendation

Unignore Service Recommendation

Configuring Service Detection

Disabling Detected Services

Service Detection is enabled by default for Datadog and Git Integrations, but it can be disabled from the integration's setup page. On the Integration page, there is a Disable service detection button within the Service Detection card. Clicking this button will pause service recommendations for that integration and remove existing recommendations from the Service Detection page. If, at a later time, you want to resume receiving Service Recommendations, you can do so by clicking the Enable service detection button. Re-enabling Service Detection will also bring back any recommendations removed when disabling.

Service Detection Card

Disable Service Detection

Managing Integration Ignore Rules

To allow you to tailor Service Detection for your unique data and needs, you can create a list of regular expressions that OpsLevel will use to reject service suggestions automatically. Each integration that is enabled with Service Detection has its own list of rules. To modify your list, navigate to the Integration page and scroll to the Service Detection card.

Add Ignore Rules to automatically discard suggestions if the resulting service alias matches one or more regular expressions

Add Ignore Rules to automatically discard suggestions if the resulting service alias matches one or more regular expressions.

When a Service is detected from that integration, we identify a service alias for the resulting suggestion. If that service alias matches any of the ignore rules defined for that integration, then the Service suggestion will not be created. When a new rule is added, the rules will be applied to existing suggestions, and any matches will be removed.

To add new ignore rules:

  1. Press the + Add Rule button
  2. Enter a value
  3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for all desired rules
  4. Press the Save Rules button.

To remove an ignore rule:

  1. Press the Delete button next to the rule you wish to remove
  2. Press the Save Rules button.

Note: We use a case insensitive match for regular expressions.