Software Catalog: What and Why for Engineering Teams

Software complexity is growing at an unprecedented rate. As companies scale, they adopt hundreds—or even thousands—of microservices, APIs, and third-party integrations. Without a system to manage these services, teams waste valuable time tracking ownership, dependencies, and compliance requirements.

This is where a software catalog becomes critical. A software catalog acts as a centralized, automated source of truth for all your services, ensuring your engineering teams can move faster while maintaining reliability and security.

In this article, we’ll explore:

• What a software catalog is and why it matters
• When your engineering team needs a catalog
• Key features to look for in a modern software catalog
• How OpsLevel’s software catalog simplifies software development

What is a Software Catalog?

A software catalog is a system that tracks and organizes all services within an engineering organization. It serves as a structured database of microservices, APIs, cloud resources, and third-party tools, ensuring teams have complete visibility into their software ecosystem.

What does a software catalog track?

A modern catalog typically includes:

• Services & microservices: Names, descriptions, owners, and dependencies so your team can onboard to new software and fix issues faster.
• APIs & integrations: Documentation, versioning, and SLAs allows teams to gain more leverage from their APIs, and improves API reuse cutting down on valuable cycle time.
• Cloud resources: AWS, GCP, or Azure components tracked in one place can make a big difference to costs and ownership.
• CI/CD pipelines: Deployment workflows and monitoring tools ensure that vulnerabilities are caught before they’re released.
• Security & compliance data: Policy adherence, access controls, and audit logs ensure team members are doing the right things (staying on the golden path) and if they stray from that path, they’re given nudges to fix and improve their software.
• Everything else: Modern software catalogs go beyond the “typical” things like microservices, offering a flexible data model that allows you to track anything and everything in your software ecosystem.

By eliminating outdated spreadsheets and fragmented documentation, a software catalog empowers teams with real-time, actionable insights into their services.

When Do You Need a Software Catalog?

If you’re encountering these challenges, it’s time to implement a software catalog:

• Scaling Complexity: As your org scales, tracking hundreds of services manually becomes impossible. Many teams start with a spreadsheet of services that is out-of-date almost as soon as its complete (if not sooner). An automated record of truth for software context means there’s no chasing down developers to fill in the blanks, they can focus on what they need to do to increase product value for the business.
• Lack of Visibility: Engineers struggle to find documentation, service owners, and dependencies. It’s reported that developers spend at least 30 minutes each day searching for information to do their jobs, and 26% of developers state spending more than an hour each day. By creating a repository of software knowledge and tooling, developers can stay in flow and increase productivity.
• Slow Incident Response: Outages take longer to resolve because teams lack a clear view of service relationships.
• Inconsistent Standards and Compliance: Security and governance checks are fragmented across teams. Without a complete and up-to-date view of your software ecosystem, there’s no real way to establish and enforce standards across the organization. Building a trustworthy and complete picture of your software empowers you to improve safety and reliability.

For fast-growing organizations, a software catalog is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. 

Why Software Catalogs Matter

A well-implemented software catalog unlocks key benefits that drive efficiency and reliability in software development:

Improved Service Visibility

• Provides a single source of truth for all services.
• Engineers can quickly locate service ownership, dependencies, and documentation.

Reliable, Up-to-Date Information

• Eliminates outdated spreadsheets and tribal knowledge.
• Uses automation to keep information current.

Easier Knowledge Sharing & Onboarding

• New engineers can onboard faster with self-service access to service details.
• Reduces reliance on direct hand-holding for common engineering tasks.

Stronger Compliance & Standardization

• Ensures security policies and best practices are followed across teams.
• Helps enforce architectural decisions and governance policies.

Faster Incident Response

• Engineers can immediately identify the right service owners and documentation during outages.
• Faster troubleshooting leads to improved MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution).

Higher Developer Productivity

• Reduces time wasted searching for information or manually tracking dependencies.
• Increases reuse of existing services rather than building from scratch.

What to Look for in a Software Catalog

Many organizations today still rely on manual spreadsheets or outdated internal tools to track services. However, these approaches quickly become unmanageable at scale.

Here’s what an effective modern software catalog must offer:

Completeness & Accuracy

• Tracks all services, APIs, and dependencies with rich context.
• Uses automated updates to prevent stale information and manual toil from software owners or platform teams.

Searchability & Ease of Use

• Engineers should be able to quickly find what they need; the more proactive knowledge surfaced, the better.
• A clear, user-friendly UI is essential to reduce cognitive load.

Automation

• AI-assisted cataloging ensures data remains fresh and accurate.
• Offloads the burden of manual service tracking.

Extensibility & Integrations

• Should evolve with your team’s needs, services, and infrastructure.
• Seamlessly integrates with monitoring, security, and deployment tools.

Many companies first try open-source solutions like Backstage but struggle with maintenance. A fully managed internal developer portal like OpsLevel eliminates the operational burden while delivering all the benefits of a software catalog.

OpsLevel’s Software Catalog: Built for Modern Engineering Teams

OpsLevel is more than just a catalog—it’s a complete Internal Developer Portal (IDP).

OpsLevel’s software catalog provides a single, automated view of all your services. With powerful automation, customization, and integrations, OpsLevel helps engineering teams move faster, enforce best practices, and ensure service reliability.

Beyond Just Services

• Track APIs, databases, CI/CD pipelines, and anything else you need to keep tabs on.
• Bring in documentation for software and APIs so that developers can understand what they own, in context.

Customizable Without Complexity

• Flexible UI + customizable widgets to surface data that aligns with your team’s goals.
• Integrates seamlessly with tools like Datadog, PagerDuty, and GitHub.

Always Up-to-Date with AI & Automation

• AI-powered service descriptions reduce knowledge gaps.
• Auto-detection of services locates everything in your ecosystem 
• Prevent duplicate entries of services by discovering aliases from multiple sources

Boosts Developer Productivity & Compliance

• Self-serve workflows with guardrails built-in empowers engineers to do more on their own without risking compliance and standards.
• Scorecards enforce best practices and security standards.
• Campaigns automatically manage big-picture project management of things like upgrades and migrations without heavy manual oversight.

For today’s engineering teams, a software catalog is essential to manage growing complexity, improve service visibility, and ensure reliable, standardized development.

OpsLevel’s AI-powered, fully automated software catalog empowers teams by eliminating manual tracking, boosting efficiency, and reducing operational burden.

If you’re investigating how an internal developer portal can help your team, start with our Complete Guide to help you define features your team needs, deciding between building or buying, and pitfalls to avoid during the discovery phase.

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