The Ultimate Tool for Engineers and Developers: Compass Premium

It’s not an every day activity that a tool comes and redefines how engineering and development teams operate, but Compass is the tool with a game-changing solution. As Atlassian's out-of-the-box internal developer platform, Compass helps teams to stay in their flow and get their work done.

Statistics might be dull to some, but when you hear that engineering teams using a good platform like Compass can be 20% more productive*, this is when things get interesting. This isn't just a number; it means to have happier developers and fewer midnight bug fixes.

What does Compass do?

Compass is your all-in-one navigation dashboard and it provides a unified platform for steering your organization through the challenges of digital transformation with ease. It helps engineering and development teams of all sizes enhance their developer experience - also known as "DevEx".

Here are four key features that makes Compass great:

1. Reduced cognitive load thanks to an extensive software component catalog

A component is the deliverable of your software engineering team. Your team is responsible for the ownership, development, and operation of a component.

Compass provides your team with a component overview, dependency mapping, and a component activity snapshot. The component overview shows you the detailed information about service components, including APIs, libraries, documentation, health metrics, deployment activities, and on-call schedules. You can use dependency mapping to track dependencies and analyze performance impact across your teams and services. The component activity snapshot lets you centralize incidents, deployments, and key activities related to a service and its dependencies, which makes monitoring a lot easier.

Component overview, Dependencies, and Component Activity

Together with Jira, Compass empowers your team to address and resolve issues as they arise. When you use Compass with Jira Service Management, your team will have better insights into the infrastructure that supports key services and relevant information from software development tooling.

2. Health scorecards and policies for improving your DevEx

With scorecards, you can standardize development and operations best practices at scale and empower your team while maintaining security, compliance, and reliability. Additionally, Compass has standard DORA metrics like code deployment frequency, commit times, deployment failure rates, and resolution times. 

The team dashboard helps you track and maintain the health of your team's components. With the CheckOps function, you can identify problem areas and improve service performance through retrospectives supported by engineering data.

Scorecards, Team dashboard and CheckOps

3. Less context switching by linking important service details

In Compass, you can link all your CI/CD, collaboration, testing, and source code management tools through publicly available APIs, so you don't have to jump from product to product. For connecting services, you can use existing integrations or build your own on Forge, Atlassian's app development platform. Also, Forge lets you customize Compass while Atlassian manages compute, storage, and security, enabling seamless app distribution to your team.

API Specifications and Apps

4. Pre-defined templates for better consistency and faster deployments

By creating golden paths, you can develop templates in Compass that align with your organization's standards and best practices, including preset information, boilerplate code, and webhooks. This makes software creation faster and repetitive tasks easier.

Creating golden paths with templates

Which plan should you choose: Standard or Premium?

Compass has two paid plans to choose from: Standard and Premium. The Standard plan is ideal for growing teams looking to level up their DevEx, while the Premium plan is great for large organizations looking to scale their internal developer platform.

Even if your company is not large, Compass Premium could still be a better fit for you. This plan offers more advanced compliance, support, and data features, including:

• 99.9% Uptime SLA, which is financially backed with service level credits
• 2 years of extended data retention, which enables you to restore your toolchain data if you need to
• IP allowlisting, which limits your site access to trusted IP ranges
• 24/7 Premium support with 1 hour response times for critical issues from the Atlassian's dedicated team

For detailed comparison of Compass plans, you can take a look at the official product page of Compass here.

If you're looking for some help choosing the right Compass plan, then get in touch with us and we will find the best fit for your team.

What to do next, then?

Now you know that Compass makes it easier for your engineering and development team to find their way through the maze of coding. It helps your team thinking in new ways, planning ahead, and fostering a culture of growth. Best of all, it makes their work lives easier and more inspiring.

On a personal side note, I'm pretty impressed how easy it is to connect different services like GitHub to Compass. What's more, showcasing all those crucial metrics, such as activities, scorecards, chat channels, or Jira links, right on the component overview is a brilliant way to cut back on context switching. My highlight is to able to create my own health metrics right alongside the 10+ predefined ones that are already available in Compass with just a few clicks. 

So, the important question is: Are you ready to take your team to the next level and help them get their work done in their best? Contact us and let's figure it out how we can make this happen together!