Roadie, provider of Backstage as a service, has announced the general availability of its Tech Insights feature — a software-quality tool added to its core offering of managed Spotify Backstage. Tech Insights is the first major proprietary feature to be offered by Roadie. Using Roadie Tech Insights, organizations can ensure that their software assets have the support and maintenance they need for optimal security, compliance, productivity, agility and availability.

Backstage—created by Spotify and now an open source incubating project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)—is used to build internal developer portals.

Roadie Tech Insights provides Scorecards that help software engineering teams keep track of their software assets in the Backstage catalog and ensure they are meeting predefined quality and compliance targets. Scorecards are created using Data Sources and Checks defined by the user.

Roadie Tech Insights provides a user interface to build three components:

• Data Sources: Data Sources collect facts about services. Tech Insights comes with built-in Data Sources with pre-defined facts that can be used without any setup. Alternatively, users can define their own Data Sources using external APIs or files in a repository.
• Checks: A Check is a rule which a service either does or does not satisfy. Checks continually test the software in your catalog in an automated way. Users can define their own Checks, such as “Does the software have an SLO set in Datadog?” Checks can leverage custom data or data from the APIs of standard SaaS tools that the organization is already using, such as PagerDuty, Datadog and Github. New integrations are easy to build.
• Scorecards: Scorecards are collections of multiple Checks, which may come from different Data Sources. Users can target Scorecards to subsets of the software in their catalog.

“Spotify Backstage is a powerful tool but like most open source projects, deploying it yourself becomes a challenge as scale grows,” said David Tuite, CEO at Roadie. “We’ve solved that problem with Roadie, delivering a SaaS offering that not only makes deploying Backstage a snap, but it preserves users’ ability to move back to the pure open source version if they determine that’s the way they need to go. The early product-market fit we’ve found is a great indicator that there’s a strong market for internal developer portals that abstract away the complexity while embracing an open source ethos.”

Roadie was founded in 2020 to help organizations adopt and operate Backstage to make developers more effective. The company’s previously unannounced seed funding round of $3.7 million closed late that year and was led by Boldstart Ventures with participation from Firstminute Capital.