Add teams
Last updated
Last updated
Teams serve as both an entity representing your organization in Cortex and as owners for different entities in the catalogs. Teams offers a centralized place for the most important information about each group, making it easier for everyone to find what they need.
Teams can be assessed via Scorecards, interact with integrations, and leverage custom data. They can also be configured in a hierarchy.
To view your teams, navigate to Catalogs > Teams.
When you open the Teams catalog page, you'll see Mine and All, which denote teams you belong to and all teams at your organization, respectively. The teams that appear under "All" will automatically display as a hierarchy, whereas those under "Mine" will be listed individually.
On the right side of the Teams catalog page, see the Scorecard Leaderboard, which highlights the ten best-performing teams within your organization.
The leaderboard is calculated from the average of Scorecard scores for all entities owned by a team. Change in rank is based on the team's score 7 days ago. You can use the dropdown to select a different Scorecard, allowing you to view the leaderboard based on specific Scorecards.
The leaderboard gamifies entity quality and encourages team members to achieve goals. This creates a culture of accountability, where everyone has visibility into how they're performing.
Each team has its own details page, where you can view key details about the team. Click a team from the Teams catalog page to view its details.
At the top of a team details page, you’ll find on-call information, Slack channels, and parent and children teams.
Additional information appears in tabs on the team's details page:
The Overview tab includes:
On-call information.
Linked Slack channels.
Where the selected team belongs within the broader hierarchy.
How the team is performing across Scorecards. By default, this will show the level that the team’s entities have reached in each Scorecard.
On the right, enable the toggle next to Aggregate children scores to include child entities in the Scorecard overview.
A list of recent events associated with this team, such as alerts from PagerDuty.
The Members tab includes a list of all team members, as well as their contact information. You can also add tags for each user to signify each member’s role on the team. When available, Cortex will also pull in profile photos from your Git provider.
The Entities tab shows a list of all entities that the team owns.
The Dependencies tab shows any incoming or outgoing dependencies associated with this team.
Teams not only allow you to collect vital information in a single place, but are also crucial for ownership. Rather than assign an entity to individual team members, you can assign ownership to an entire team. This makes it easy to assign multiple team members to an entity, and it ensures that when a team’s composition changes, ownership is updated accordingly.
Read more in the Ownership documentation.
You can create teams:
By importing them from a connected integration (e.g., Workday, GitHub)
Manually in the Cortex UI
Via the entity descriptor YAML through GitOps
Via the API
You can configure teams to reflect the actual hierarchy at your organization while creating or importing teams in Cortex. A team can be defined as the parent of one or more teams while also being the child of another team.
When you access the Teams catalog, individual teams and parent teams are displayed by default. Parent teams have an arrow next to their name, indicating that you can expand to view children teams.
In the above example, My Company is a parent team with 7 child teams nested under it.
See the tabs below for instructions on each method.
If you have an existing source of truth for your teams and team members, we recommend importing teams. By integrating with your identity provider at this stage, Cortex will automatically sync team pages with your source of truth so you don't have to update information in more than one place when people join or leave teams.
Each integration syncs teams daily.
You can only import entities from integrations that have already been configured.
Teams from the following integrations can be imported:
Before following the import process, you must configure table mappings.
For the Workday integration, you can enable automatic import of discovered teams.
After configuring an integration that includes teams, follow these steps to import teams:
In Cortex, navigate to Catalogs > All entities, then click Import entities.
Select the integration to import from.
If you have a large volume of entites, click Filter in the upper right corner of the results list to select and apply entity type filters.
At the bottom of the page, click Next step.
Edit the details for the entity:
Type: Select Team.
Name: Enter a human readable name for your team.
Identifier: This field is auto-populated based on your entity name. It is a unique identifier for your entity. This is also known as the x-cortex-tag.
Description: Enter a description of the team to help others understand its purpose.
Groups: Select groups to segment your entity.
Members: Select members of your team. Team members will be marked as owners of entities and receive notifications about entities owned by the team if notifications are enabled.
Links: Add links to external documentation, such as runbooks, docs, logs, or custom categories.
Slack channels: Link the team's associated Slack channel. If notifications are configured, the team will receive notifications here.
You must have the Slack integration configured before linking a channel.
Parents and Children: Define parent and children teams. This is where you configure the hierarchy for your entity. These can be visualized in the relationship graph.
On-call: Configure the on-call service associated with this team. When selected, you will see the latest on-call information displayed on the team's details page.
Click Confirm import.
It is possible to edit entities after creating them:
Navigate to the entity's page.
In the upper right corner, click Configure entity.
Make any desired changes.
Note: The only field you cannot edit is the identifier.
At the bottom of the screen, click Save changes.
You can manually create a team member role:
In Cortex, navigate to Settings > Entities > Teams.
Click Add role.
In the "Add role" modal, configure the role:
Role name: Enter the role's name.
Tag: The tag - a unique identifier for the role - automatically populates based on the role name.
Role description: Enter a description of the role.
Enable notifications by default: If notifications are enabled, members with this role will receive relevant updates on Scorecards, Initiatives, and more.
Click Save.
You can apply a role only to manually-created team members. Team members who were imported from an identity integration will retain the role that was imported.
To apply a role:
In Cortex, navigate to Catalogs > Teams.
Click into a team.
In the upper right corner, click Configure entity.
Click Members.
Next to a team member, click the edit icon.
In the side panel, add a new team role.
Click Update.
Under Settings > Entities > Teams, there are several settings relating to teams:
In this section, you can select which identity providers will be used to sync team and team memberships into Cortex.
When importing teams, you will see the option to import from the enabled IdPs listed here.
When enabled, any discovered teams and team relationships from Workday are automatically imported.
In order for teams to be imported, Workday needs to be enabled under the Enabled identity providers section on this settings page. The Workday report must include the managerEmail field in order for team relationships to be auto imported.
When enabled, entities can only be edited by specific members of the team that own them. Read more about this feature in Team ownership entity editing.
When enabled, all team members will be granted edit access. You will not be able to turn off edit access for individual members in your teams configuration when this is enabled.
When enabled, Cortex will automatically assign roles to team members based on your enabled identity providers. Leave this option disabled to assign team roles manually.
This process is described above, under Adding team member roles.
Choose Import discovered entities.
On the following page, after the integration sync is complete, a list of entities from the integration are displayed. Check the boxes next to any entities you want to import.
If you selected more than one entity: After the first entity is configured, click the name of the next entity on the right to navigate to the detail editor for that entity.
Choose Create entities manually.
