Archium’s ‘Quick Peek’ videos give you a demo of a single feature of Archium in just 2 minutes. and how it can help your team. Watch the Quick Peek about the Components Directory below:
Components Directory
Archium’s Components Directory lists all the Components in our system.
You can see here that they’re categorised by their type, so in this system we’ve got Services, Functions, Databases and Message Brokers, though there’s lots of other types, too.
Now, obviously this is the most basic functionality of any service catalogue. It’s literally just a list of components. And yet, having a simple list of every Component that’s in a system can be immensely helpful.
If you can imagine a new CTO taking over, or a new tester joining your team, one of the first things they’re going to want to know is “What are all the moving parts in our system?” As simple as the solution of having a list is, it’s something many teams don’t actually have. Or if they do have one, it might be
incomplete or out of date.
Now in Archium we can assign owners to Components, and if we’ve done that then we can categorise the Components Directory by who the owners are:
So here we’re looking at a list of teams, and the Components owned by each of those teams.
Crucially, at the bottom we have a list of Components which have no owner assigned, which would probably be something an Engineering Leader would want to address.
Populating the Components Directory
How do Components get into this directory?
Ideally, we’ll want to build this list and keep it up to date automatically.
If we can connect Archium to our system’s distributed tracing, it will automatically find Components in the tracing data and prompt us to add them to the catalog.
If we don’t have tracing but we’ve got some other source of Component data, like source code repos or deployment descriptors, we could probably use Archium’s API to add Components we find in that data.
Lastly, we can always add a Component manually here in Archium if we need to.
We hope you enjoyed that quick peek at the Component Directory feature of the Archium service catalog.
What Next?
Want to see more of Archium’s unique capabilities? Check out our Quick Peek videos playlist on YouTube.
Got questions about what Archium is and how it works? You’ll probably enjoy our Frequently Asked Questions.
Want to try Archium for your team? Get in touch so we can set you up with a free trial.