These release notes mark a significant milestone for Port: automations. Ever since we began developing Port, we knew that the software catalog is at the core of the portal, that it is real-time, and that it contains important context other tools don’t have. The next logical step was leveraging this power for automations, which were possible in Port but complex. These release notes contain the automations feature. It is meant to help you realize the power of the portal. Stay tuned: we have more to do on the automations front, and we will.

⚡️

We are excited to unveil our new Automations feature, designed to streamline and enhance your developer workflows. Automations allow you to automatically trigger workflows, alerts, and notifications based on changes within the software catalog, such as a new entity being created, a timer that expired, a scorecard change, or any other change in existing entity data. See docs to learn how to set up your first automation.

🌊

integration is now better, allowing you to display an accurate, real-time representation of your AWS resources as part of your software catalog and customize the integration in Port. See docs.

With the new integration, you can import monitors (also known as alerts), SLOs, and services from your Datadog account into the Port software catalog. See docs.

🚥

You can now define custom levels and colors for scorecards. For example, you can use levels with stoplight colors. See docs.

Creating and tweaking how data sources map to your software catalog is now a much better experience, as we introduced a playground to test your mapping on real examples. See docs.

As an API-first company, we are proud of our API and its capabilities. Today, we improved our API Reference so you can explore, learn, and test the API routes more efficiently than ever. Visit the new API docs

You can now apply filters and conditions to day-2 actions so that they appear only on the relevant entity actions list. See docs.

You can now delete entities using a webhook integration definition. See docs.

We improved the order in which global search results appear, making it easier to find what you need. See docs

You can now rotate your Port organization secret/s using the UI or the API. See docs

As part of the automation feature, we added an invocation method to create or update entities in the software catalog based on the automation context or user inputs. This is useful for automating changes based on events in the software catalog or creating self-service actions to update specific properties of an entity utilizing RBAC for self-service actions. See docs.

Our biggest news this month is the GCP integration, allowing you to see all GCP resources in the portal, in context of any other software catalog entity. We’ve also worked on many usability improvements, and added a handy automation feature.

In other news, we also released a simple tool to help you plan your portal roadmap as part of our portal-as-product approach. You can access it here.

You can now ingest Google Cloud resources into the software catalog, including projects, container clusters, cloud-run services, BigQuery tables, compute engine autoscaler, and other GCP objects. The integration with GCP supports real-time event processing, which allows for an accurate real-time representation of your Google Cloud infrastructure inside Port. See docs.

✏️

You can now create custom payloads when setting up actions. You can use it to set up self-service actions that can directly connect to existing APIs or pipelines without the need to make adjustments in a separate step. See docs.

In the builder tab, we made working on the data model easier:

You can now display a specific entity’s number property in any dashboard with the number chart. For example, get an MTTR metric for a service directly from PagerDuty and display it on the specific entity dashboard. See docs.

You can now set an automated workflow by triggering actions automatically on behalf of users. These actions will show up for users on their “my actions” panels. See docs

It’s springtime, and along with the new flowers, leaves and the natural beauty of the season, Port re-branded. In case you haven’t noticed, check out the Port site or your Port developer portal. We also invested in letting you create personalized places for developers where they can easily see what needs to be done, and similar experiences for platform engineers modifying the data model.

↘️

We're excited to unveil Port's fresh rebranding. Here’s to our designers Val Burtakov and Ory Zydner, for better expressing what Port is all about, and creating a site and brand that we really love. Have a look.

🗒️

Instead of working in the builder section of the portal, platform engineers can now make changes to the data model directly in the software catalog. You can now add and edit properties in catalog tables, making data model changes easy and immediately seeing how the changes will be seen by developers.

With the new “Action Card” widget, you can now add self-service actions to your dashboards within its context, creating a holistic developer experience. For example, add a “Rollback Service” action to an incident management dashboard. This reduces context switching and helps make any insight immediately actionable. You can display one or more actions in one widget. Learn more.

You can now download a specific table view as a CSV or JSON file for further use.

We’ve added a new sidebar search so you can easily find the catalog page you need.

Create and update entities based on any array in an incoming event. Learn more

The Gitlab Ocean integration now allows the creation of webhooks on specific groups and choosing which branch to listen to.

The biggest item in February’s release notes is Folders. Folders play a key role in realizing our portal-as-product approach, since they allow platform engineers to provide the right experience by developer, team, and manager. Folders let you group portal elements in a way that makes immediate sense to users and only provide them with what they need for a given use case. Additional items this month also focus on improving portal experiences, from the ability to add page and dashboard descriptions to action run status labels.

📁

We are excited to announce the release of folders!

🔌

This Ocean-powered integration makes it easier to integrate Azure DevOps by adding Projects, Repositories, Pull requests, Repository policies, Pipelines, Teams and Members to your catalog. Learn more.

---------------------------------------------------------

You can now view live event logs coming from Ocean integrations. These events contain valuable details for debugging your integration, such as the current status of the ocean container, resync process, and integration startup.

The new event log view is available for all Ocean integrations on the “Data sources” page.

You can now add a custom label to the action run status to reflect any step in the action process. These will be shown as part of the action run status card panel. Learn more.

Add descriptions to pages and dashboards to make them easier to understand and search. Descriptions can be added when creating or editing the page or using the API.

---------------------------------------------------------

When testing JQ expression for a new calculation property, you can now load an existing entity example to test with real scenarios.

See changes in actions and scorecards definitions using the Audit Log page.

For a better user form experience, we now support a toggle form input type. Note that “Select” input type is still available for cases where more than True/False is needed.

You can now configure page permissions with IaC. See docs for Terraform or Pulumi.

visualize your CI/CD pipelines by adding views for Jenkins jobs, builds, and users. Install integration here. See docs here.

provide developers and security engineers with a centralized view of their Wiz controls and issues. Install integration here. See docs here.

--------------------------------------------

Use these actions to create self-service actions for your developers - provision Azure resources, trigger Datadog incidents

--------------------------------------------

To make it easy to debug issues when writing JQ, we now display JQ error messages when trying to test or save invalid JQ.

The table “free search” capability has improved and now supports searching each word separately instead of the entire search term.

When creating/editing self-service actions, you can now switch to “JSON mode” instead of the editing form.

We enhanced the Terraform provider by adding support for - aggregation properties, and the “required” JQ setting for self-service actions.

In order to create a more seamless experience for Port Members, the "Builder" tab is now hidden for them.

2023 was a breakout year for Port, and these release notes mark the end of a year that was spent making Port better, together with our community. Since opening the roadmap (see here) we’ve received numerous insights about what you need us to do in Port. In 2024 we hope to do more, better and faster, so that you can deliver exceptional developer experience and productivity using Port.

📊

We added ready-made and easy-to-create dashboards so that you can simply track engineering scorecards and initiatives. Once defined, the dashboards will appear in the catalog section.

Just like any other page in Port, you can customize these dashboards to your liking (such as adding/removing dashboard widgets) ✨

You can create these dashboards by clicking on the “New” button in the “Catalog” section.

🔌

We’ve improved Port’s Kubernetes integration and made it simpler with the following:

See how to visualize your Kubernetes runtime.

⚡️

The “Action run” widget allows you to display a table with the run history of a specific self-service action. This new widget can be added to any dashboard.

The widget will display as columns the general details of each run (ID, status, start, end) and also the specific inputs of the action that was filled by the user who executed it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We have added more integrations that are powered by Ocean 🌊

When filtering a user property, you can now select the "Me" option in the "Has any of" operator to display only the entities with the logged-in user in the specific user property.

This is very useful when creating personalized views. For example, creating a personal on-call view containing only the services with the logged-in user in the "On-call" user property.

When a new blueprint is created, a default catalog page is created automatically.

In some cases, these pages can clutter the catalog side menu. Previously, they couldn't be deleted, and now you can! We hope this change will help you build a more clean and intuitive catalog for users 👩‍💻

Note - you can always re-create pages by clicking the "New" button in the "Catalog" menu and clicking on the "New catalog page" button.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can now manage self-service action permissions using IaC. See docs for Terraform & Pulumi.

When an organization has a lot of projects/repositories, it can be difficult to create an Ocean deployment config that will automatically create the webhooks on all those projects.

Using “System” hooks, the GitLab integration will create a single webhook for the entire GitLab instance.

See how to use system hooks.

We created a handy script to help you easily back up your entire Port account (blueprints, entities, actions, scorecards, and teams).

See how to export a backup of your account.

You can now display V3 Async API specification using the Swagger UI blueprint property type.

We’ve added documentation about how to install the following integrations using ArgoCD - Port self-service actions agent, Kubernetes, and any Ocean integration.

In this edition of Port’s release notes, we’re focused on making metrics and scorecards actionable and easy to use as well as customizing the developer experience ✨

🔢

The new “Aggregation” property type for blueprints allows you to calculate metrics based on the relations in your catalog, supporting many aggregation types such as count, average, min, max, sum, and median.

Examples of aggregation properties for a microservice:

Aggregated metrics are also valuable for scorecards.

To create a new aggregation property, go to the “Builder” page → expand a blueprint → click on the “New property” button → choose the “Aggregation” property type.

Learn more about the aggregation property type here.

📊

Dashboards just become way more awesome! You can now fully control the dashboards and homepage layout by changing the location and size of the dashboard widgets, allowing you to curate views for the exact needs of your users for an optimized developer experience! 🚢

⚡️

When building a self-service action, you can now use the & keys to dynamically hide/show inputs and set the “required” setting by creating conditions based on form inputs, action, and user data.

These two additions let you create sophisticated forms that support multiple scenarios and adapt to the needs of your users.

See how to control the “required” setting of self-service action inputs.

See how to control the visibility of self-service action inputs.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Automatically send Slack reminders or reports relating to scorecards or initiatives. This reminds developers of standards that should be met, and helps managers stay on top of changes or initiatives.

See how to send scorecard reports and reminders.

Often, developers need to perform different code and configuration changes to reach desired standards as defined in scorecards or initiatives.

You can now automatically open Jira tasks in case standards aren’t met, and also close them upon resolution.

See how to sync Jira tasks with scorecards.

To help you quickly get up and running with Port, we have created step-by-step guides for common use cases to implement in your developer portal.

Here are new guides from the last month:

To view all guides, see the guides docs page or go to Port’s guides hub by going to the “Builder” page → clicking the “Guides” button at the top right of the page.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

When using the Port agent for self-service actions, you can now alter the requests sent to your third-party application by providing a payload mapping config file when deploying the Port-agent container.

This will allow you to curate the payload sent to 3rd party applications according to their specific requirements.

See how to control the payload using the Port agent.

You can now change the initial catalog page filters to determine the initial data displayed on a catalog page. This is useful for creating more focused views by default, without filtering the table after it loads.

To change the initial filters, click on the page menu button → click on “Edit page”.

Here are October's release notes. If there is an overarching theme, it is that of personalization and visualization. With new table summaries, we allow you to create valuable home pages, dashboards, and catalog views. With FinOps integrations, we provide you with the data to make those views even more powerful.

With the new table widget, you can display any catalog table in your dashboards by defining custom selections. For instance, a table widget can show all open pull requests or deployments from the last 24 hours. This provides a richer experience to developers and managers.

Using Table summaries you can add better data visualization to dashboards, catalog pages and developer/manager home pages.

Column summary - the bottom row of each table displays a summary of all values for each table column.

Group summary - when applying a "group by" to a table, each group will have summaries for that group for each table column.

This capability offers a quick and easy way to consume data, such as:

Table summaries are available in catalog pages and table widgets, as well as dashboards. The current version includes summaries for the following columns: Enum, Scorecards, and Scorecard rules. Stay tuned for more column types in the future.

You can now set action execution permissions according to your blueprint definitions. When configuring permissions to execute an action, the new capability can query the catalog to create a permission condition based on these queries. This enables scenarios such as:

See how to define dynamic permissions.

We have added several cost management integrations:

With these new integrations, you can easily bring cost data and incorporate it into your catalog by displaying it in different views and dashboards, enabling developers, teams, and managers to stay on top of costs in the organization at any level (service, team, domain, and more).

Refer to our docs to read more about the kubecost, opencost, and AWS cost integrations.

Any user can now generate an access token with their authenticated permissions, enabling anyone to have access control at the API usage level.

To generate a personal token, click on the menu button at the right side of the top navigation menu and click on “Credentials”.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

We have added more integrations that are powered by Ocean 🌊

When filtering the data of a widget, you can now reference user data (such as the user's team). This creates personalized user dashboards.

For example, create a "my open Jira issues" table that will contain only the logged-in user's open issues. This capability is available for all selection-based widgets (pie chart, number chart, and catalog table).

See how to use dynamic filters for widgets.

To help you quickly get up and running with Port, we have created step-by-step guides for common use cases to implement in your developer portal.

Each guide covers an end-to-end developer routine, which can be used by your organization when completing it.

To view the guides, see the guides docs page or go to Port’s guides hub by going to the “Builder” page → click on “Guides” button at the top right of the page.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Scorecard rules can now be displayed as table columns. This lets you create views focusing on improving specific parts of a scorecard and letting users drill down on scorecards easily right from the table.

The GitLab integration allows exporting of specific folders into catalog entities. This new capability enables visualizing your monorepo services in Port.

See how to use GitLab for monorepos.

We have added the ability to export deployments and environments into catalog entities.

See how to export GitHub deployments and environments.

This month's release notes are all about the developer experience, customizing the developer homepage/dashboard, and helping developers immediately see what's important for them. Additionally, we added tools to make it easier for the portal admins to see which data sources are in use and what they're adding to the portal.

“Data sources” is a new addition to the "Builder" section. It unifies all integrations and APIs in one place. This allows you to:

You can now create dashboards that will appear as a page in the main catalog side menu (in addition to the dashboard tab on the specific entity page). Each dashboard can contain multiple widgets that display graphs and metrics related to your entire catalog, supporting various use cases such as SDLC, DORA metrics, cost management, system performance, and more ✨

Dashboards and catalog pages can be created using the "New" button in the Catalog.

The homepage is now customizable. It supports adding multiple widgets, such as charts, iframes, and markdowns.

Coming soon - create dynamic filters for dashboard widgets. This supports creating a personalized experience on the homepage and any other dashboard.

------------------------------------------

The “related entities” widget automatically displays a specific entity's upstream and downstream relations. Each relation is displayed as a tab with a table containing all related entities.

The “New tab” button allows you to add multiple relation tabs to add relations that are not automatically displayed by the widget and create different views. For example, Adding two deployment tabs, one for staging and one for production.

Read more about the related entities and the “new tab” capability.

The specific entity page is now more customizable! Change the order of the entity page tabs to show the most important content to your users first.

When defining a “webhook” invocation method for a self-service action, we have added the ability to define a “sync” webhook type. When this type is configured, Port will automatically determine the action status according to the HTTP response status code.

This capability is in addition to the already existing “Async” webhook type, in which Port will wait for the action status to be updated via an API call as part of the action’s logic.

Read more about the webhook invocation method.

------------------------------------------

We have added support for mapping GitLab file content into Port using GitLab Advanced Search API. Combined with scorecards, you can define organizational standards across your repositories.

See how to map file content into Port.

We have added support for mapping GitHub teams & GitHub dependebot alerts into Port, allowing you to visualize:

See how to map GitHub teams and dependebot alerts into Port.

When creating a “Swagger UI” blueprint property, you can now ingest the API spec as YAML in addition to the URL and object formats.

Read more about the “Swagger UI” property.

August is summer and summer is vacation time. Don’t ask us how we accomplished everything in these release notes… here they are:

1. At last, we launched our open-source extensibility framework project -

2. Ocean lets you easily extend Port’s capabilities by creating new integrations using a robust OSS framework that takes care of all the repetitive work, so you can focus on adding new capabilities to your developer portal. It works well for third party tools as well as anything in-house you’d like to integrate into the portal.

3. You can now expect to see many new integrations coming from Port. With the community, even more 👥

4. We’re really curious to see what the Port community will do with Ocean. You can learn more here

5. In the near future we plan to add capabilities to Ocean, dealing with the backend side of developer self-service actions.

1. Our new Azure integration allows you to collect resource data from Azure and add it to the developer portal.

2. Since the integration is powered by Ocean it supports smart filters and transformations to make it easier to map Azure resources to the desired Port Entities.

3. See how to use the Azure integration.

1. You can now define a Secret input when building the self-service action form. Values that are entered into the Secret input will be encrypted before being sent and will not be saved in Port. This is a great way to let your users enter secrets as part of the self-service actions (such as passwords, private keys, and tokens) in a secure way.

2. See how to add a secret input.

---------------------------------

1. In addition to the Azure exporter mentioned above, we added several highly requested integrations:

2. Jira

3. New Relic

4. SonarQube

5. PagerDuty

1. By installing our GitLab integration, you can now search in files and perform logical checks on file contents to determine whether a file exists in the repository or if files in the repository contain specific keywords.

2. A good example of using this is the ability to check if a repository contains a file and define a scorecard to enforce standards related to it.

3. See how to search in GitLab repository.

1. You can now define scorecards as code using our Terraform Provider.

2. See how to create scorecards in IaC.

1. There is a new property for both self-service actions & blueprint properties that lets you multi-select through a closed list of enums

2. See how to configure it for blueprints and for self-service actions

1. When defining a calculated property, you can now test it in a playground in full page view:

2. We also improved the flow while configuring custom integrations.

1. In addition to the already available Pie chart and Number widgets, you can now use an iframe widget in the dashboard page to specify any external URL and custom component

2. See how to define iframe widget.

1. You can now delete the blueprint and all of its entities from the UI or API without any limit on the number of entities that will be deleted in the operation, all in a single request. Previously there was a limit of 1000 and it required 2 different calls to do so.

2. See how to do this from the API.