Production readiness
Why it matters
Every production service should meet a baseline standard ownership, documentation, monitoring, on-call coverage, and security compliance. But without a systematic way to check, production readiness becomes a checklist in a wiki that nobody maintains. Services ship without runbooks, on-call rotations go unassigned, and the gaps only surface during an incident when it's too late to fix them calmly.
What to track
- Service ownership: Every service has a defined team owner and on-call rotation.
- Documentation: README completeness, API spec presence, runbook availability.
- Monitoring and alerting: Services have configured health checks, SLOs, and alert rules.
- Security compliance: Vulnerability scan coverage, dependency update policy, secrets management.
- Infrastructure hygiene: Branch protection enabled, CI checks required, deployment pipeline configured.
How Port helps
Port's production readiness scorecards evaluate every service in your software catalog & context lake against the criteria you define, using Bronze, Silver, and Gold maturity levels. Data flows in from your version control, incident management, observability, and security tools so the scorecard reflects reality, not self-reported status. When a service lacks an owner, has no runbook, or is missing monitoring, the scorecard flags it immediately. Workflows can notify the team or block deployments until the gap is closed.
Example scenario
After a painful incident where the on-call team couldn't find the runbook for a critical service, a VP of Engineering mandates production readiness standards. They create a scorecard in Port: Gold requires an owner, on-call rotation, runbook, SLO, and passing security scan. Silver requires ownership and documentation. Bronze is the minimum just an assigned owner. The initial scan shows 30% of services have no owner at all. Within four weeks of making the scorecard visible to all teams, ownership coverage reaches 95% and runbook coverage doubles without a single manual audit.
Example dashboard
Example Production Readiness scorecards dashboard based on Setup Production Readiness scorecard guide.
Follow the recommended guides below to implement this use case.