Promote scorecards

What is a Scorecard?

Scorecards enable us to define and track metrics/standards for our Port entities, based on their properties. Each scorecard is comprised of a set of rules, where each rule defines one or more conditions that need to be met. Each rule has a level property whose value can be one of the following: Gold, Silver or Bronze.

For example, to keep track of your organization's Services maturity, we can create a set of scorecards on top of a Service blueprint that will keep track of their progress.

💡 Scorecard use cases

Scorecards can be used to evaluate the maturity, producton readiness and engineering quality of any entity in your software catalog, for example:

• Does a service has an on-call defined?
• Does a README.md file exist in the repository?
• Is Grafana defined for the K8s cluster?
• Is the relation of a certain entity empty?

In this live demo example, you can see the scorecards defined on a service and their evaluation. 🎬

Scorecard structure table

A single scorecard defines a category to group different checks, validations and evaluations. Here is the structure of a single scorecard:

Field	Type	Description
title	String	Scorecard name that will be shown in the UI
identifier	String	The unique identifier of the Scorecard. The identifier is used for API calls, programmatic access and distinguishing between different scorecards
filter	Object	Optional set of conditions to filter entities that will be evaluated by the scorecard
rules	Object	The rules that we create for each scorecard to determine its level

A scorecard contains and groups multiple rules that are relevant to its specific category, for example a scorecard for service maturity can contain 3 rules, while the production readiness scorecard can contain 2 completely different rules.

Rule elements

Rules enable you to generate checks inside a scorecard only for entities and properties.

A scorecard rule is a single evaluation consisting of multiple checks, each rule has a level which directly translates to how important it is for the check to pass (the more basic the check, the lower its level):

Field	Type	Description
title	String	Rule name that will be shown in the UI
description	String	Description that will be shown in the UI when the rule is expanded. Value that contains markdown is also supported and will be displayed in a markdown format
identifier	String	The unique identifier of the Rule
level	String	one of Gold Silver Bronze
query	Object	The query is built from an array of conditions and a combinator (or / and) that will define the

Combinator

There are two available combinators: and/or:

• and - will apply a logical AND operation between all rules, requiring all of them to satisfy for a given asset in order to return it;
• or - will apply a logical OR operation between all rules, requiring at least one of them to satisfy for a given asset in order to return it.

single rule queries

If you only have a single rule in your query, the combinator has no effect. But keep in mind that it still needs to be included to adhere to the query structure.

Single rule query example

In the following example, only a single rule appears in the rules array, so the combinator field has no effect:

{
  "combinator": "and",
  "rules": [
    {
      "property": "$blueprint",
      "operator": "=",
      "value": "myBlueprint"
    }
  ]
}

And

{
  "combinator": "and",
  "conditions": [
    {
      "operator": "isNotEmpty",
      "property": "on_call"
    },
    {
      "operator": "<",
      "property": "open_incidents",
      "value": 5
    }
  ]
}

Or

{
  "combinator": "or",
  "conditions": [
    {
      "operator": "isNotEmpty",
      "property": "on_call"
    },
    {
      "operator": "<",
      "property": "open_incidents",
      "value": 5
    }
  ]
}

Conditions

Conditions are small boolean checks that help when determining the final status of a query according to the specified combinator:

Field	Description
operator	Search operator to use when evaluating this rule, for example =, !=, contains, doesNotContains, isEmpty, isNotEmpty below
property	Property to filter by according to its value. It can be a meta-property such as $identifier, or any other standard entity property such as slack_channel including Mirror Properties and Calculation Properties
value	Value to compare to (not required in isEmpty and isNotEmpty operators)

Available operators

Operator	Supported Types	Description
=	String, Number, Boolean	checks if the rule value is equal to the entity value
!=	String, Number, Boolean	checks if the rule value is not equal to the entity value
<=	String, Number	checks if the rule value is less than or equal to the entity value
>=	String, Number	checks if the rule value is greater than or equal to the entity value
<	String, Number	checks if the rule value is less than the entity value
>	String, Number	checks if the rule value is greater than the entity value
contains	String, Number	checks if the rule value is contained within the entity value
doesNotContains	String, Number	checks if the rule value is not contained within the entity value
endsWith	String, Number	checks if the rule value ends with the entity value
doesNotEndsWith	String, Number	checks if the rule value does not end with the entity value
beginsWith	String, Number	checks if the rule value begins with the entity value
doesNotBeginWith	String, Number	checks if the rule value does not begin with the entity value
isEmpty	String, Number, Boolean, Array, Object	checks if the rule value is an empty string, array, or object
isNotEmpty	String, Number, Boolean, Array, Object	checks if the rule value is not an empty string, array, or object

Scorecard total level calculation

A Scorecard is built from several rules, and each one of them has a level property.

The available Scorecard levels are:

Basic -> Bronze -> Silver -> Gold

An entity always starts at the Basic level.

A rule's lowest possible level is Bronze.

Once an entity passes all of the rules for a certain level, its level changes accordingly, for example:

1. An entity starts at level Basic;
2. It has two rules with level Bronze;
3. Once the entity passes those two rules, its level would be Bronze;
4. It has four rules with level Silver;
5. Once the entity passes those four rules (and the rules from Bronze level), its level would be Silver;
6. etc.

multiple rules scenario

In the example listed above, let's assume the entity passes just one of the two Bronze rules, but it passes all of the Silver rules. The level of the scorecard will still be Basic, because not all Bronze rules have been satisfied.

Filter elements

Filters enable you to apply scorecard checks only for the entities and properties that you really care about.

Filters follow the same querying structure as rules.

A scorecard filter is used to make sure only relevant entities are evaluated, only entities that the filter evaluates to true on will have the specified rule checked:

Field	Description
combinator	Defines the logical operation to apply to the query rules
conditions	An array of boolean conditions to filter entities with

Scorecard UI indications

After configuring scorecards for the blueprint, each entity created from it will have a Scorecards tab in its entity page, detailing the different checks and their results:

Additionally, the catalog page of each blueprint will automatically have a column for each scorecard rule.
For example, this service blueprint has 4 rules configured, and we can see a column for each of them in the catalog:

Customizing views

You can use table operations (sort, edit, group-by, etc.) to create various helpful views of your scorecards.
For example, here are the scores of all Services in an organization grouped by team:

Note that every coloumn (scorecard metric) in the table has an aggregation in the bottom, hover over it to see the compliance of this metric across all entities in the table.

Rule result summaries

Scorecard rules are automatically added as columns in the relevant catalog page, and each such column is summarized on the bottom.
For example, these services have some rules defined in their scorecards, and we can see that:

• 100% of Team Batman's services have an on-call defined, but only 67% of them have a PR cycle time shorter than 1500 minutes.
• The bottom of the table contains an aggregation of the results of each rule for all services (across all teams). 11 out of 18 services in total have a build success rate that is higher than 70%.

Next steps

Explore How to Create, Edit, and Delete Scorecards with basic examples

Dive into advanced operations on Scorecards with our API ➡️