Our first step towards universal search

There are a lot of different ways to use OpsLevel’s catalog. A user session might begin on the Dependency Graph or the Deploys across Service tab. Or it might start with a filter that returns all Tier 1 services written in Ruby.

But the simplest and most frequent entry point to the catalog is a search. It’s a UX that any regular user of a computer is accustomed to. It’s so routine that it’s easy to take for granted. 

Because it’s so routine, catalogs should have great search! Google’s original mission was to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. OpsLevel wants to do the same thing for important information within your software engineering organization.

Our new search experience, powered by Elasticsearch on the backend, is a key first step in that direction.

What’s new in Search?

First and foremost, migrating our backend search infrastructure to Elasticsearch means our search is much faster. In particular, catalogs with hundreds or thousands of services will notice a clear performance improvement.

We’ve also improved the search experience by providing more context on the search results page.

Specifically, results are now ranked by match quality and the results page includes highlights letting users know where within the service metadata matches were found.

This includes surfacing secondary metadata like service descriptions, aliases, and products in the results page when matches are found there. Search results should answer questions, not raise new ones.

What’s in scope today?

For each service in your catalog, service names, aliases, tags, owning teams, descriptions, products, languages and frameworks are all in scope. This coverage is unchanged from our original search–but not for long! 

What's next for Search in OpsLevel?

Our new search architecture is far more extensible than its predecessor. This sets us up to deliver a far more comprehensive search experience, one that eventually covers nearly all the data you store in OpsLevel.

In the near term, we’re prioritizing making your technical documentation searchable in OpsLevel. If you’re interested in a catalog with a powerful search experience, request your OpsLevel demo today.

Want to learn more about our migration to Elasticsearch? Our engineering team reviewed the project in detail here.