Getting started with Compass

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Welcome to the Compass community! Compass is a developer experience platform that provides a unified representation of the engineering output in one place.

Compass helps you track the things your engineering teams build and rely on — we call these components. The following are some concepts that are core to Compass:

Components

Compass provides a component catalog where all your services, libraries, applications, and other components are tracked and managed.

Manage components manually in Compass or via config-as-code (YAML configuration file) with an external component manager like Bitbucket Cloud.

Teams

Compass also brings your team into one place to manage the components they own and to understand the dependencies and information about other team’s components.

Scorecards

Scorecards help you establish best practices without slowing down your team. Build and use scorecards to give teams autonomy to create new components while ensuring best practices are followed. For example, the service readiness scorecard helps you prepare services to be tracked in a production environment. Create different scorecards and apply them to different components.

Apps and integrations

Manage your components with config-as-code, a compass.yml file managed by an app like Bitbucket Cloud. More apps are coming soon to help you sync your existing components with Compass.

Getting started

If you haven't signed up already, go ahead and do so via our signup form.

Getting started with Compass is simple, and starts with creating your first components.

Add components

Select Create in the top navigation to add components. You can also add components via the API. Once a component is added, it’s managed in the Compass UI or, optionally, via a compass.yml file which is managed alongside the component and syncs with Compass.

Learn more about how to add a component or how to use config-as-code in Compass.

Set up your team

A team in Compass is a collection of Atlassian accounts – an Atlassian team. Atlassian teams have members, a profile, work, and resources. The team members collectively work towards achieving a common goal.

Start a team to get your teammates into Compass to share component information and ownership. Teams should take ownership of components their team owns so that there’s a defined way for others to get more information or help with a particular component. Owner teams are defined on each individual component, or teams can assign components from their team’s dashboard. Learn more about what you can do on a team’s dashboard.

Discover components

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.

Browse the component catalog to see what components your organization has already added to Compass. The component catalog is organized by component type, so be sure to explore the different component types using the left side menu.

Use the Compass search bar to search for components by name, team, or description. When you begin typing in the search field, you’ll see results organized by component type.

Teams can add different information to their components, such as defining an owner team for that component, chat channels, on-call schedules, and details like the relevant repository, documentation, dashboards, projects, and other links.

Get started with config-as-code

Configuration as code (config-as-code) is an automated method of maintaining Compass component data in a Git repository. You can choose to declare component details in a YAML file that sits alongside the source code for the component itself.

Config-as-code enables Compass to be the single source of truth for your component management because your YAML files will automatically sync with Compass when updates are made to a component’s data. Learn more about managing components via config-as-code.

Get started with scorecards

Check out the Readiness scorecard under Settings to get an idea of how a scorecard can help build organizational best practices. This scorecard is used for preparing services to be tracked in a production environment. You can edit this scorecard to address your specific readiness requirements for service components or create new scorecards.

Custom scorecards enable you to:

• Define company-wide standards and policies. Ensure that your teams are aiming for the same standards when it comes to things like security, etc.

• Define team standards. Apply scorecards to the components that your team owns, besides the company-wide standards.

Apply your scorecards to components and you’ll see your scorecard and the current percentage of completion displayed on a component’s details page. Learn more about scorecards and how you can use them in your organization.

Need help?

Have a question, found a bug, or need help? Support will be provided via this group. Simply ask a question here and we’ll help you out as best as we can!

[Walter Buggenhout]

@Kelvin Yap, 

Maybe a noob question, but is it somehow possible to either import existing services from JSM and/or Insight assets into components?

I might not have gone deep enough into the overall setup of Compass yet, but I do want to avoid having to maintain information in different places.

[Kelvin Yap]

Hey @Walter Buggenhout ! Not a noob question at all :) It isn't possible to import existing services from JSM and/or Insight assets just yet, but we'll be exploring this more during the beta.

In a pinch you could import components from your SCM provider if they're there or possibly via our GraphQL API. How many components do you currently have spread across JSM/Insight that you'd want to bring over?

[Carlos Siqueira]

Hello Folks:

 I have 3 years of experience with DevOps on Salesforce and brand new to Jira/Compass.

I need ASAP to prepare a high-level demo to show the value proposition of Jira and Compass.

Is anybody available to help? I am in Tampa Florida and will make myself available ANYTIME that feeds your agenda.
Please let me know and I send you a Zoom invite.

Thanks!

[Taylor]

Hey @Carlos Siqueira I am really sorry we missed this last week. I would love to speak to you about the value prop of Jira + Compass. 

Hopefully this is not too late. You can book time at https://calendly.com/tpechacek/compass. Looking forward to speaking with you.

Cheers!

[Lucia Rocca]

Hi @Taylor is there still a possibility to schedule a Compass Demo?

Thank you, 

Lucía

[Ismail Hamdane]

I want to know how the work developed here. I don't know anything about the site.