Create, view, update, and delete components

Create a component

A component is an output artifact of your engineering team. It could be a service, a library, an application, or something else.

A component’s catalog listing in Compass is the unified view of all information about the component. The first step to build a component catalog is to create components.

Create a component manually

To create a new component manually:

1. In Compass, in the top navigation bar, select Create > Create component.
2. Select a component type.
3. Enter the component’s name.
4. Select an owner for your component.
   • Although adding a component owner is optional, we highly recommend that you add one. Learn more about why adding an owner is important
   • If the owner team doesn’t exist yet, that's okay. Select + Start a team to create and assign a team to the component right away. Or, you can create your component now, start a new team later, and then assign it to the component when you are ready.
5. Select Create.

We’ll add your component to the catalog and take you to the component’s details page, where you can add detailed information such as links to repositories and documentation, chat channels, dependencies, and more.

Create a component using the API

You can also create components using the Compass GraphQL API. Learn how to create components using the API

View a component's details

A component's details page is the single place in Compass where you’ll find everything you want to know about your component. In the details page, you’ll find what the component does, who owns it and how to contact them, its links and dependencies, scores, and more.

To view your component’s details, use any of the following methods:

• In the component catalog, locate your component and select its name.
• Search for the component and select its name in the search results.
• Search for the team that owns your component. On the team’s dashboard, from the Team components list, select the component’s name.

When you view a component, you'll first see the Overview page. This page groups the key details about the component.

1. Basic details: This section is the first place the users look when they view a component’s details. It shows the component’s basic details such as its name and description, lifecycle stage, and labels. For service-type components, the tier appears here.

2. Scorecards and Metrics: This section shows the scorecards and metrics you apply to a component. Scorecards show a component’s health based on set criteria. Metrics provide data points that help you track and assess the performance of your processes, products, and teams.

3. Owner team: This section shows the owner team’s information. An owner team has a defined responsibility towards managing a component. You can assign or change a component’s ownership from this section.

4. Chat channels: This section shows links to the owner team’s chat channel. Users can reach out to the component's owner team for information about the component.

5. On-call: This card shows links to a component's on-call roster. The on-call links are available only for service-type components. These links give you access to the people who can provide help with the component or support you during an incident.

6. Links: These sections list the links to a component’s resources, such as repositories, projects, documentation, dashboards, and other links.

7. Custom fields: This section shows all custom fields associated with the specific component type. With custom fields, you can add valuable information to a component that’s not available using Compass’s default fields.

8. Component navigation: Pages providing more information about the component appear in the component navigation. Some of these pages are available by default, for example Activity or Dependencies. Whereas, some pages become available when you install different apps on Compass, for example, Swagger UI or Statuspage.

Component types

Every component has a type, so you can categorize components based on their capabilities. You set a component’s type when you create it, and can change its type at any time.

The following component types are available in Compass:

• Service — An independently-deployable software unit that is usually is operated by a person or a team. Services can be as large as monoliths or smaller microservices. Service components have a Tier field to indicate how critical the service is to your business.

• Library — A reusable collection of objects, functions, and methods. A library is typically used by other components.

• Application — A fully-packaged application, like a mobile application, desktop application, or a CLI-type tool.

• Capability — A higher-level product functionality that end-users understand and in which they see value. A capability is an abstraction of one or more underlying software components that power it.

• Cloud resource — An entity or service provided by a cloud vendor, with consumer-managed configuration and monitoring.

• Data pipeline — A sequence of tools and processes used to automate the transformation and movement of data from a source to a target system.

• Machine learning model — An algorithm that identifies patterns in a data set and makes predictions over it.

• UI element — Reusable building blocks of a design system that meet a specific interaction or user interface need and work together to create patterns and user experiences.

• Website — A single web page or a collection of related web pages under a single domain. Websites mainly consist of audio-visual or text content for reading, listening, or viewing. People can't edit, contribute to, or affect the website content. Websites are typically publicly accessible and don't require authentication.

• Other — A component that doesn’t match the service, library, or application type.

Change a component's type

1. Go to the component's Overview page.

2. Select More actions > Change component type.

3. Choose the component type you want to change to.

   • Custom fields and scorecards will be reapplied based on the component type you change to.
   • If you change to the library, application, or other type, the current service tier, and on-call schedules will no longer be visible on the component. Learn more about the component type attributes
   • If you change back to a component type you previously used, you'll get back the original information that was associated with it.

4. Select Change.

Delete a component

You can delete a component’s catalog listing from Compass. Deleting a component permanently deletes the component’s associated data from Compass. You can’t undo the deletion.

We don’t delete any component data from other systems outside Compass.

To delete a component from Compass:

1. Go to the component’s Overview page.
2. Select More actions > Delete from Compass.
3. On the confirmation dialog, select Delete to confirm the deletion.