Engineering teams struggle with fragmented access requests and approvals across Slack and Jira, causing delays and inefficiency. A DevOps service catalog centralizes services with clear ownership, dependencies, and documentation—transforming tribal knowledge into self-service capabilities that reduce MTTR.
This approach standardizes workflows, automates provisioning, and establishes clear ownership. Engineers gain self-service tools, incident commanders access dependencies instantly, and compliance remains intact without slowing delivery.
The seven-step framework below creates a sustainable service catalog that engineering teams readily adopt.
Step 1: Audit Your Engineering Requests
Slack pings about database restarts, Jira tickets for access, and incident notes on "missing dashboards" all point to the same bottleneck—repeat work that dilutes your team's velocity.
- Surface the high-volume, high-friction requests to convert them into catalog items and cut average handling time by double-digit percentages.
- Export the past 90 days of Slack, Jira, and post-incident data. Aggregate, then classify each entry by request type, environment, urgency, and effort. Scattered records across multiple tools are inevitable—a disciplined audit reconciles them into a single truth set.
- Inspect content patterns next. Search Slack for verbs like provision, grant, deploy. In Jira, sort by label or component to identify "frequent flyers." For postmortems, tag any delay that lists "waiting on X" as a potential service candidate. Quantify frequency (requests per week) and friction (average resolution hours) to rank importance.
- Consider what engineers typically ask your team for in Slack, which Jira issues recur more than twice a sprint, what incident reviews flagged as delayed or manual, and where approvals or provisioning consistently stall. Document these patterns to build your baseline.
Sample findings often look like this:
| Service Name | Request Type | Source | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provision Kubernetes NS | Infrastructure | Slack | SRE |
| Add GitHub Collaborator | Access & Identity | Jira | DevOps |
| Restart Production Database | Incident Action | PagerDuty Postmortem Prioritise candidates that appear weekly and demand manual intervention—these consume the most engineer time and yield the fastest ROI once automated. Defer niche or one-off requests until the core catalog is live. Inline CTA: Need help classifying your service request chaos? Download the “Engineering Request Audit Template” to organize, rank, and score every repeat request. Step 2: Define and Group Your ServicesTransforming your scattered service requests into an organized catalog requires structured classification and thorough documentation. This systematic approach ensures engineers can quickly find and use services while maintaining clear ownership and accountability throughout your organization.
Standardized descriptions deliver measurable benefits: APIs read the same fields your engineers write, keeping the catalog current without manual maintenance. When every service shares a schema, routing rules, approval workflows, and analytics become configuration, not custom development work. Looking for a ready-to-use schema? Grab the “DevOps Service Catalog Planning Sheet”—a downloadable spreadsheet that includes ownership, SLAs, inputs/outputs, dependencies, and more. Step 3: Build Intake Forms That Don't SuckBlocked engineers need request resolution, not form completion marathons. Design intake forms to capture automation triggers in under 60 seconds. Dynamic forms achieve this speed by displaying context-relevant fields based on requester identity, request type, and target environment. This approach eliminates static, universal templates that create friction in service catalogs. Three design principles govern effective forms:
To ensure you’re doing it right:
Use Siit's Dynamic Forms to auto-populate user identity, infer environment from branch naming, and route the request to the correct resolver group in less than 60 seconds. The feature annotates each submission with AI-generated labels, so you can skip manual triage entirely. Tired of clunky intake forms no one wants to fill out? Check out how Siit’s Dynamic Forms auto-fill context from Slack and route requests without manual triage. Step 4: Route Requests AutomaticallyManual triage forces you to read every request, guess its context, and copy-paste it to the right queue. Automated routing eliminates that waste by analysing each request's attributes—tool, cost, environment, and requester role—and assigning it to the correct resolver group in seconds. Begin by codifying deterministic rules. "Production + deployment" always routes to the release manager, whereas "development + database" goes straight to the platform bot for self-service provisioning. You can also add a cost threshold so that any spend over USD 500 triggers finance review. The result is predictable, auditable request flow. Escalation keeps the engine honest. Set a timer—if the assignee has not acknowledged a priority-1 incident within 60 minutes, the rule escalates it to the staff SRE and posts a Slack alert. Siit's AI Triage takes this approach further by analyzing historical resolution patterns and semantic request content. The system identifies intent beyond simple attribute matching—recognizing when a "database question" actually requires backend infrastructure expertise, or when a "deployment issue" signals underlying network constraints. Step 5: Define Approval WorkflowsApproval workflows safeguard production systems while delivering change requests within defined SLAs. Rule-based gates convert ad-hoc "LGTM" messages into auditable checkpoints that unblock engineers predictably. Select an approval model per service type. Single approvers handle low-risk actions while multi-level chains protect sensitive infrastructure. Parallel approvals compress time when distinct roles—security and finance—must sign simultaneously. Map each service to a model and identify items for auto-approval based on documented policy controls. Embed approvals within engineering workflows. Siit’s Rapid Approvals, for instance, surface inline Approve / Decline buttons in Slack or Microsoft Teams, eliminating context-switching. Status updates thread back to original requests so participants track progress without portal refreshes. Configure timeouts to prevent approval limbo. Escalate to the next authority tier or auto-rollback changes when SLA clocks expire. Notify approvers at submission and T-10 minutes. Additional pings add noise and erode compliance. Step 6: Track SLA & Resolution PerformanceService catalogs without performance measurement become abandoned documentation repositories. Implement real-time tracking across four core timestamps to convert operational data into continuous improvement actions. Instrument each service request with creation, first response, resolution, and final closure timestamps. From these events derive the DevOps "Four Keys" (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) recommended by DORA and Atlassian. Calculate automation coverage as the ratio of requests closed without human intervention to total requests over the past 30 days. Run this calculation nightly and expose the figure on an "Automation Metrics Dashboard" alongside manual outliers to identify workflows ready for scripting. Present quarterly to management using a single slide: metric, previous value, current value, delta, planned remediation. Stakeholders see an accountable, numbers-driven operation; practitioners gain a clear mandate to optimise. Inline CTA: Time to benchmark your ops health? Download the “Automation Metrics Dashboard Template” and track SLA compliance, MTTR, and more—all in one page. Step 7: Publish and Maintain Your CatalogSuccessful service catalog deployment requires strategic implementation where engineers already work. Follow these five steps to ensure adoption and maintenance:
Ensure your catalog is:
How to Launch a DevOps Catalog in SiitImplement a DevOps service catalog in just five working days with Siit's platform to transform scattered communication into structured workflows. Follow these steps to achieve 90% auto-routing of requests with zero custom code:
Sign up for Siit today and join hundreds of leading organizations that have cut MTTR while boosting developer productivity. Our 14-day free trial gives you full access to all features, dedicated onboarding support, and proven implementation templates. You can also schedule a personalized demo and see how your team can deploy a complete DevOps service catalog in less than a week.  English       |
