Best practices for end-to-end service ownership with Datadog Service Catalog

A service catalog is an essential component of an organization's internal development resources, providing stakeholders with insights about how teams are running their services. By extensively documenting and centralizing knowledge about your services, a service catalog can help implement fine-grained access control, audit service health, find observability gaps, and plan upgrades without running into snags where team members cannot access the information they need and do not know who to call. Service catalogs are populated by using a registry of service definitions that include a standardized set of information about each service, such as associated teams, owners, code locations, on-call engineers, and contact channels. The catalog can also include assets like scorecards, SLOs, dashboards, monitors, and monitoring data for context around test coverage, security posture, cost attribution, and other service health indicators. To build a service catalog, you need to establish your service definitions, registering your services alongside the metadata and telemetry that personnel can use to learn about them. Depending on your monitoring system and service catalog solution, you may be able to discover services automatically or manually declare them. Regardless of which service discovery methods you use, you should form a reliable process so that service owners and other stakeholders can easily create and maintain their service definitions. Service catalogs are not one-size-fits-all, and there are many things to consider when building and maintaining your catalog as the data changes and your teams spin up new services. By enriching your catalog with metadata and telemetry from your monitoring stack, you can use it to enforce service ownership standards, streamline incident response, and provide context for inter-service projects.