Atlassian Compass (Beta) a source of truth to unite them all! DevOps alert, this is cool!

Today I suggest you take a walk through the beta version of Atlassian Compass. You will see that it is a simple but effective tool and that it can help us to unify all the applications in a single one, and even in the not too distant future it could become the main index of your company… Let me explain better.

In all modern medium-sized companies we have: web pages, blog, Github code, Bitbucket code, Jira software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, OpsGenie or PagerDuty, StatusPage, New Relic, Amazon Web Services, … etc, that is a large number of Services that we monitor and that cannot stop working, plus many other companies develop code and make commits and pull requests and CI/CD. How can we unify all this and take metrics?

Now that everyone works distributed, how do we pass on the knowledge to the new ones? : What team leads such a microservice? Who is oncall for microservice X?

Many of these questions happen in companies, so Atlassian Compass (Beta) has come to give us a proposal for all this. Compass the UNIFIER!

SPOLIER: It can be configured as code in Bitbucket and get automatic metrics!

Let’s get started, first Compass asks us to import or manually create the Components. A Component can be “anything”, for example, a Bitbucket repository, an item of your hardware on AWS, an App (as a concept), or just a bundle of other Components. And the nice thing about Components is that we can join them together as dependencies and that will then give us a concept map of our Components.

What I liked the most is that the import of Components has been automatic, both from Bitbucket and from Amazon Web Services. With Bitbucket you can even activate an option to import the repository, and also automatically add code to that repository in an extra Pull Request that, when accepted, will automatically send us the metrics to Compass! And that’s great!

The Component configuration can be updated from the magic file (compass.yml file is in the root of the Bitbucket repository) and best of all, it can be done by any DevOps and can be fully automated in the rest of the repositories!

Component import options are: Bitbucket, Github, GitLab, CSV file, etc. In addition, later with the plugins you will also be able to see other types of imports such as AWS.

We assume that over time this section of Apps will be filled with new ones with new import options, but currently there are already important Apps available!

The main pages are quite well done, basically it is a list of filterable Components. What I like the most is that each Component is associated with a scoreboard that is configurable together with the metrics that are also definable. Bitbucket’s, as I mentioned, are automatic. The scoreboards help us detect if any service needs help or intervention in an easy way!

Within a Component you can see and link anything you can think of, for example, the Jira Project, Dashboards, Confluence documentation, Repositories, Team Announcements, Responsible Team, Oncall Team, Monitoring, StatusPage, all in one ! About time :D, I know some Auditors who are going to love it! At last everything is traced in a definitive system

Example, from the Component we can see which team is in OpsGenie assigned on Saturdays.

You can also post an issue from the Component to the StatusPage in no time!

Finally, before I forget, I would like to show you the options of the Meters and Scoreboards, since these visual indicators are great to see errors or deficiencies and act on time so that our services and Applications do not fail.

Well, we will leave it here, I hope that now with these explanations you will know better the beta version of Compass and what is the mission that it tries to lead, in this case, as you have seen, it tries to UNIFY all the systems in One! And this time I think they have succeeded 🙂

What do you think? Would you use it in your company? Do you know someone who might find it interesting? Do not doubt to keep in touch with me

Have a great day people!