Discovery - Overview

Value Stream Management (VSM) relies on automation. No developer wants to document things manually, especially not in a continuous delivery world. We support our customers in two ways:

• With out-of-the-box integrations, you can get started extracting your data within minutes. It could be a plugin, or it could be a scheduled job hosted by us.
• With powerful APIs that enable you to build your integrations and leverage our platform capabilities to monitor them & keep them up-to-date.

Get the right information from the right place

VSM combines information from typical phases of your software development lifecycle. The goal is to support your development team with intuitive, up-to-date documentation - so work with them to understand what to extract and how.

• Development time - Some information like team ownership or used programming language can be pulled directly from source code repositories
• Deployment time - pushes out of your CI/CD pipeline give an easy insight into what's deployed and when. Typically they are the easiest starting point for your documentation but need to be augmented with more information to capture all aspect
• Runtime - in addition to deployment time, runtime information (e.g., from Kubernetes) helps you to validate what should be live (deployment) against what is really live - helping to identify & address the so-called Architecture Drift
• Finally, information from [supporting systems (like API management, vulnerability scanners, ...) can augment development, deployment & runtime information to obtain the full picture.

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Best Practice

Always get information from where it logically belongs, e.g. deployment time information shouldn't come from a runtime environment like Kubernetes but directly out of your CI/CD pipeline.

Integrations

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OOTB vs Community Driven

Out-of-the-box integrations are fully developed and supported by LeanIX.

Community driven setups are contributions of our best-efforts from & to the community. As such, regular LeanIX service SLA and support do not apply to these projects. We are open to discuss the work and are of course open to any contributions by the community 💙

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Your favourite integration is missing?

Check our roadmap and submit your ideas.

APIs

VSM offers state-of-the-art APIs to use REST or GraphQL to execute most actions programmatically (e.g., import data).

Discovery API

The REST-based Discovery API can be used to bring Team, Service, SBOM, and Product data into the VSM catalogs, including specific meta information such as descriptions, tags, and relations. Through this, it is possible to bring in information from further sources that no OOTB integration can discover, for example, by pushing data as part of your CI/CD pipeline builds. Technical information on the API can be found here, and a few example tutorials are below.

Events API

The REST-based Events API complements the above with the possibility of bringing release, incident, and change events into VSM. This can, in turn, be processed as DORA metrics on your services and teams, expanding the out-of-the-box functionality provided by the repository and PagerDuty integrations. Technical API documentation can be found here.

GraphQL API

The GraphQL API gives you access to the VSM knowledge graph, i.e., all the information about teams, persons, services, libraries, products, and their relations. This essentially allows you to do anything programmatically that you might otherwise do via UI.

To access the GraphQL API, please use the GraphiQL Explorer available right in the VSM Workspace under Administration> Developer Tools. There, you can run queries and mutations of the data stored in VSM.

Release Stages

The stages can be summarized as follows:

1. Not Available

Although this is not a de-facto release status, any integration not found on VSM documentation or roadmap is currently not planned for. Hence, there is also no committed timeline. If you believe you’re missing an integration, we are more than happy to hear from you via a Zendesk ticket or [email protected].

2. Early Access

This integration is under development and supports VSM in collecting early feedback and issues by early adopters. Integrations in this stage should be experimental and by no means production-ready. APIs in this stage might change unannounced. At this stage, there is no binding support SLA.

Aspects to note:

1. integrations in this stage are feature-complete but can still contain breaking (API) changes
2. depending on the integration, these features might need to be enabled via support / Customer Success Manager (CSM)
3. Feedback is more than welcome via Productboard or Zendesk

3. General Availability

In this stage, the integration is considered production-ready. They are fully supported by LeanIX support, and documentation is regarded as sufficient to onboard users independently.

Aspects to note:

1. Integrations in this stage are feature-complete for the communicated scope. There are no backward incompatibilities
2. LeanIX fully supports these integrations & APIs, and the normal SLA applies
3. These integrations are self-configurable via the integrations page in the administration section

Tutorials

Want to see some examples of how the APIs above can be utilized? We got you covered - in the tutorials section, you find some detailed step-by-step guides on the most common cases our APIs are used for:

• Importing Services
• Setting up CycloneDX Software Bill of Material (SBOM)
• Importing Services & Software Libraries
• Setting up a Jenkins pipeline to import SBOMs