Service Catalog

The service catalog is the core of Gantry — a searchable, filterable, and navigable registry of every software component, team, and infrastructure piece in your organization.

What Goes in the Catalog?

Entity Kind	Examples
Service	Payment API, Auth service, Frontend app, Background worker
API	REST API, gRPC interface, GraphQL schema, Event topic
Team	Platform team, Backend team, Frontend team
Environment	Production, Staging, Development
Infrastructure	PostgreSQL database, Redis cache, S3 bucket, SQS queue
Action	Deploy workflow, Database migration, Rollback script
Documentation	Runbook, Architecture diagram, API docs

Browsing the Catalog

The Catalog page in the UI shows all entities in a filterable table. You can filter by:

• Kind — Services, APIs, Teams, etc.
• Owner — Filter by owning team
• Tag — Filter by any tag
• Lifecycle — Filter by development stage
• Namespace — Filter by namespace (if using multiple)

Entity Detail View

Click any entity to see its detail page with tabs:

• Overview — Spec fields, links sidebar, metadata
• Relations — Dependency graph showing connected entities
• Activity — Audit log filtered to this entity
• Plugin tabs — Kubernetes, GitHub, ArgoCD tabs appear automatically when the entity has relevant annotations or spec fields

Relationships

The catalog tracks relationships between entities. These are defined in entity specs:

payment-api (Service)
    ├── deployedIn → production (Environment)
    ├── deployedIn → staging (Environment)
    ├── dependsOn → postgres-payments (Infrastructure)
    ├── dependsOn → auth-service (Service)
    ├── providesApis → payment-api-v2 (API)
    └── owned by → platform-team (Team)

The relationship graph (/api/v1/graph/{kind}/{name}) traverses these connections and returns a graph suitable for visualization.

Search

Press / in the UI to open the command palette. Search works across:

• Entity names
• Titles and descriptions
• Tags
• Owner names

Search is powered by SQLite FTS5 full-text search — results appear in milliseconds without any external search infrastructure.

# API search
curl "http://localhost:8080/api/v1/search?q=payment" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>"

Ownership

Every entity should have an owner field pointing to a Team entity name. This enables:

• Filtering the catalog by team
• Understanding who to contact for a service
• Tracking which teams own which infrastructure

metadata:
  name: payment-api
  owner: platform-team    # References Team/platform-team

Real-Time Updates

When any entity is created, updated, or deleted, Gantry broadcasts the change over WebSocket to all connected clients. The UI updates in real-time without requiring a page refresh.

Annotations

Annotations are arbitrary key-value metadata. They're used by plugins to store cross-system identifiers:

metadata:
  annotations:
    github.com/repo: acme/payment-api
    argocd.io/appName: payment-api-production
    kubernetes.io/cluster: prod-k8s
    kubernetes.io/namespace: payments

Plugin Annotations

Plugin annotations are filtered from the generic "Annotations" card in the UI. Each plugin renders its own card with the relevant annotations displayed in a human-readable format.