Rely.io September 2024 Product Update Roundup

This September, we’ve delivered several enhancements focused on simplifying onboarding, increasing transparency, and improving the out-of-the-box value of our platform. Whether you're exploring Rely.io for the first time or a long-time user, these updates aim to make your experience smoother and more productive.

Free Trial: Start Your Journey Toward Better Developer Experience and Performance

We’re excited to offer a 15-day free trial of Rely.io, allowing you to explore how our platform can transform your developer experience and boost engineering performance. During the trial, you’ll have access to all of Rely.io’s core features, designed to deliver immediate value:

• Software Catalog: Gain complete visibility into your services and systems, with a constantly updated catalog that integrates directly with your development tools. No more stale documents or scattered information—find everything in one place.
• Self Service: Empower your developers to take operational actions, such as scaffolding new services, without relying on manual processes. This keeps best practices and security measures in place while improving efficiency.
• Scorecards: Set measurable goals, such as increasing deployment frequency or improving security standards, and track your progress automatically using metrics like DORA. This helps your teams continuously improve their performance and compliance with company standards.
• Homepages: Tailor your dashboards to focus on what matters most to you, with customizable views that aggregate your key data, from pull requests to incidents, all in one place.

During the free trial, you won’t be left on your own. We provide best-effort support to ensure you get the most out of your trial and can experience the full benefits of Rely.io. For more details, check out our full announcement here.

Please note that free trial accounts come with just one limitation: you can only add Git plugins at this time. However, this still allows you to explore key features and see how Rely.io can streamline your development processes.

Self-Service Onboarding Wizard: Get Set Up in Under 5 Minutes

Setting up the Self-Service Agent has just gotten easier with our new onboarding wizard, designed to help users get up and running in under five minutes.

This step-by-step guide ensures that each setup action is completed correctly by validating each step in real time, such as confirming the Agent’s heartbeat to verify it is operational before proceeding.

For advanced users who prefer more control, you can still skip the onboarding and achieve the same results by following our detailed documentation here.

Currently, the wizard supports Agent deployment via Helm chart, but we’ll soon be adding support for Docker deployments, making it even more flexible to match your preferred setup method.

This intuitive experience not only saves time but also reduces the likelihood of setup errors, ensuring a smoother path to realizing the benefits of Self Service for your teams.
Once the agent is successfully set up, users can enjoy Self Service actions and increase Engineering autonomy and productivity.
But what happens if the agent encounters an issue and actions cannot be run anymore?
Our platform can now detect agent failures and while users can still create actions and add them to the agent’s queue to be run, they are clearly notified the agent is not properly responding and needs attending to.

Stay tuned, as we’ll be expanding this wizard to improve other workflows, like adding plugins.

Action Approval: Frictionless Control for Critical Self-Service Operations

Self-Service Actions eliminate the delays and frustration of traditional TicketOps workflows, allowing developers to move quickly and autonomously.
However, for critical operations—such as scaffolding new services, provisioning costly cloud resources, or granting temporary access to secure systems—having control mechanisms in place is essential.
Our Action Approval system ensures that developers can still move fast while giving Platform Engineers a frictionless way to validate and approve these sensitive actions.
When an action requires approval, the system adapts the experience for developers by changing the call-to-action from [Run] to [Submit], making it clear that additional approval is needed.
However, in the past, developers had limited visibility into the approval process—such as who would be reviewing their submitted actions.

That’s now changed. We’ve introduced a new section in the action submission form, which clearly outlines who can approve each action, giving developers full transparency into the next steps of the process. This improvement adds clarity while maintaining the fast-paced efficiency that Self-Service is designed to deliver.

Standardized Integrations for Consistent Catalogs

We’ve standardized key concepts across our integrations to deliver a more consistent and valuable Software Catalog out-of-the-box. Tools like Git providers often implement similar features (e.g., Deployments, Environments) differently. With this update, Rely.io now standardizes how these core concepts are imported into your catalog, ensuring a unified experience across different platforms. This means less manual adjustment and more immediate value, no matter what tools you use.

On the Horizon

Here’s a preview of features coming next:

• Guided Experience for Adding Plugins: Soon, we’ll be bringing the new configuration wizard to the journey for adding new plugins, ensuring every step is clear and efficient there too.
• Onboarding Wizard for Free Trials: New users will soon benefit from a step-by-step guide, taking them from first login to actionable insights like DORA metrics in under five minutes.
• Enterprise SSO Support: We’re adding support for OIDC and SAML for secure, enterprise-grade Single Sign-On (SSO).
• Standardized Plugins: Look out for improvements as we standardize more plugins by type (Incident Management, Observability, CI/CD), making integrations even more seamless.

As well as our next incoming Plugins:

• FluxCD
• ServiceNow
• Incident.io
• Rootly
• Jenkins
• Linear

Not a user yet?

If you’re looking for an Internal Developer Portal or are simply interested in trying everything we described here, you can get started for free with Rely.
Want to see Rely in action? Play around in our demo environment, or get your own account here.