Service Catalog Entry

Service Catalog Entry Skill

Produce a complete service catalog entry for a microservice or internal platform service — giving any engineer at the company the context they need to understand what the service does, how to depend on it, what its reliability characteristics are, and where to go when something goes wrong. A well-written catalog entry eliminates "who owns this?" and "is this safe to use?" questions that slow down teams depending on shared services.

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not already provided:

• Service name — the canonical identifier used in code, monitoring, and deployments
• Team and owner — team name, tech lead name, and on-call contact
• Architecture overview — what the service does, what calls it, and what it calls
• SLA requirements — availability target, latency SLO, support tier, and maintenance window
• Key APIs — the most important endpoints other teams use (method, path, brief description)
• Data handled — what data the service stores or processes, sensitivity classification, retention

Output Format

Service Catalog: [Service Name]

[One sentence — what this service does for consumers, in plain language]

e.g. "The Payments Service processes charge, refund, and subscription billing events for all Acme products."

Identity

What It Does

[Two to three paragraphs in plain language — no jargon or acronyms without explanation.]

[Paragraph 1: The business problem this service solves. What would break or be missing if this service did not exist?]

[Paragraph 2: How it works at a high level — the main processing model (e.g. request/response API, event-driven consumer, batch processor), what triggers it, and what it produces.]

[Paragraph 3: What this service is NOT responsible for — the explicit boundaries. This prevents other teams from building incorrect assumptions about scope.]

Architecture Context

System Diagram

[Upstream callers]          [This Service]             [Downstream dependencies]
                                                        
  [Web App]  ──────────→                          ──→  [Primary Database — PostgreSQL]
  [Mobile API]  ────────→  [Service Name]         ──→  [Cache — Redis]
  [Partner API] ────────→  (Port 8080/gRPC)       ──→  [Message Queue — Kafka/SQS]
                                                   ──→  [External Service / API]
                           ↓ emits events to
                        [Event Bus / SNS]
                           ↓ consumed by
                  [Downstream Service A]
                  [Downstream Service B]

Who Depends on This Service

What This Service Depends On

Service Level Agreement

Availability and Latency

SLO dashboard: [Link to monitoring dashboard] Current error budget remaining: [Link to SLO dashboard or inline value]

Support Tiers

To raise an incident: Page via [PagerDuty service link] or post in #incidents. To raise a feature request or bug: File a ticket in [JIRA project / GitHub repo Issues].

Maintenance Windows

• Planned downtime: [e.g. "Sundays 02:00–04:00 UTC — advance notice posted to #[team-channel] 48h before"]
• Deployment window: [e.g. "Weekdays 10:00–16:00 UTC — no deploys on Fridays or the day before a public holiday"]
• Breaking changes notice: [e.g. "Minimum 30 days notice for breaking API changes — see versioning policy below"]

API Contract

Authentication

All API calls require: [e.g. "Bearer token via Authorization header. Tokens are issued by the Auth Service (/api/v1/token)"]

Authorization: Bearer [jwt-token]
Content-Type: application/json

Base URL

Key Endpoints

Full API documentation: [OpenAPI/Swagger spec URL] | [Postman collection URL]

Versioning Policy

• API version is in the URL path (/api/v1/, /api/v2/)
• Minor additions (new optional fields, new endpoints) are non-breaking — no version bump
• Breaking changes (removed fields, changed types, authentication changes) require a new major version
• Deprecated versions are supported for [90 days] after the successor reaches GA
• Deprecation notices are posted to #[team-channel] and emailed to registered consumers

Error Response Format

{
  "error": {
    "code": "[ERROR_CODE]",
    "message": "[Human-readable description]",
    "request_id": "[UUID — include in support tickets]",
    "details": {}
  }
}

Common error codes:

Events Published (if event-driven)

Data Classification

Data residency: [e.g. "All data stored in us-east-1. EU customer data stored in eu-west-1 per GDPR requirements."] Compliance scope: [e.g. SOC 2 Type II / PCI DSS Level 2 / HIPAA / GDPR] Data access policy: [e.g. "Production database access requires [approval process]. Access logged and reviewed quarterly."]

Operational Runbooks

Monitoring dashboards:

Known Limitations

Document limitations honestly — this section prevents other teams from building on incorrect assumptions.

Getting Started

To start using this service:

1. Request access: [Link to access request form or instructions]
2. Get your service account credentials: [Link to process]
3. Read the API docs: [OpenAPI spec URL]
4. Try the sandbox environment: https://[service-name].sandbox.[company].com
5. Join the consumer Slack channel: #[service-name]-consumers

Client libraries (if available):

Quality Checks

• "What It Does" is written without jargon — a new engineer from another team can understand it in under 2 minutes
• SLO targets are specific numbers agreed with stakeholders — not aspirational or copied from a template
• All direct upstream consumers are listed in the "Who Depends on This" table — no omissions
• API error codes are accurate and tested — not aspirational documentation
• Known limitations are honest — nothing is glossed over to make the service look better than it is
• All runbook links are live — not broken references or TODO placeholders
• Data classification includes retention period and encryption status — not just sensitivity level
• The entry has been reviewed by at least one consumer team to confirm it matches their experience of the service

Anti-Patterns

• Do not write aspirational SLO targets — targets must be agreed with stakeholders and based on historical data, not copied from a template
• Do not leave runbook links as TODO placeholders — broken or missing links make the catalog entry worse than useless during an incident
• Do not omit the "Known Limitations" section to make the service look better — undisclosed limitations cause incorrect integrations and downstream incidents
• Do not list API error codes without testing them — aspirational error documentation misleads consumers
• Do not write the "What It Does" section with jargon — a new engineer from another team must understand it in under 2 minutes