Scorecard Basics

Background

Establish meaningful standards, help developers improve, and measure their progress. Powered by your catalog, configure8's scorecards enable your organization to define standards, programmatically evaluate them, and give teams the optics and motivation they need to improve.

Creating a Scorecard

To create a scorecard, go to the Scorecards tab and click +Create Scorecard.

Fill in the scorecard's name and select an icon to represent it in your application.

Set your scorecard's status to Active if you intend to immediately apply it to services and want services owners to get notifications, or set it to Draft if you're going to be building the scorecard and reviewing with stakeholders before you want to activate its measurement on its applied services.

The Auto-apply option allows you to change behaviour from Apply Manually to services (default) to it to services (default) to Auto-apply to Current and Future Services.

Optionally you can set a Start Date and End Date if the scorecard is intended to be a time-bound (vs. evergreen) initiative. We see this used a lot for migration-type initiatives.

Click Create Scorecard to create and begin selecting services and checks.

Selecting Applied Services

Scorecards operate on services. You must select one or more services that your scorecard will be evaluated against. To do this, navigate to the Applied Services sub-tab and click +Apply to a Service.

Now, select the desired services from the list and click save. You can add and remove services to a scorecard at any time.

Scorecards also have a auto-apply feature that applies it to all current and future services created. This can be configured in the Auto-apply field at Scorecard creation, or later at the right panel when viewing one:

Adding Checks

Checks are the heart and soul of Scorecards. They are what get configured and evaluated against the scorecard's applied services to produce a score.

To add a check, navigate to a scorecard, and under the Checks tab, click + Add Check

This will bring up the list of checks. Select the check you wish to add from the list.

Each check is configured uniquely so you'll want to see the Scorecard Checks documentation for the details. In this example, we're configuring the severity level and number of Github Dependabot alerts a service must have to pass.

Once configured, you can add notes. This is an important step! Scorecards that are most effective tell team owners why the check is important, and link to information that will help them be successful in passing the check. It's leveraged work so take the extra time to add notes!

We also have a button to live test the check at building time. Just select one service to check against and click Test:

When all the information is present, click Save to save the check and return to the scorecard, or Save and Add New if your're going to add another check and you'll be taken directly to the check selection dialog.

Notifications

Scorecards have built-in notifications for both scorecard owners and for service owners. Click the bell to see the notification settings.

Note that notifications will only be sent on active scorecards, not draft scorecards.

Scorecard Plug-in for Service Pages

configure8 has added a service page plugin to make it easy for service owners to see the scorecards they're evaluated against right on their service's detail page.

To add the scorecard plug-in, navigate to your service detail page (Catalog -> Serivces, select the desired service), and select + Add Plugin from the page.

Select Scorecards from the plug-in list

This will add the scorecard widget to your service page. You can now see the scorecard widget and expand it to see details.