Tech Docs from OpsLevel is the fastest way to turn siloed, internal service documentation into shared context that’s discoverable and searchable by your entire engineering organization.
With Tech Docs, all your internal docs stuck in markdown files scattered across repos can now live in your OpsLevel catalog—so context and search are built-in.
And, if you’ve not yet fully adopted docs as code or want to raise your internal docs bar, we can help with that too.
Why are internal docs so frustrating?
Internal documentation is an ongoing struggle for most software teams, especially in our increasingly remote-first world. Research shows that a team of 50 developers loses 333–651 hours each week searching for information to solve problems.
Knowledge is spread across wikis, Google Docs, Notion, your team-specific Stack Overflow, and maybe even Confluence (don’t get us started on Slack or MS Teams).
During product discovery, one OpsLevel user said:
Confluence is an abyss. There are docs in there a decade old. No idea how accurate they are.
Clearly, the current landscape of solutions has many different options with lots of bells and whistles. But the end result is knowledge fragmented across multiple tools, developers frustrated with user experiences that don’t suit them, poor adoption, and lost productivity.
Fortunately, there's an emerging new solution: docs-as-code. A docs-as-code approach to managing internal documentation solves major pain points around the developer-authoring-experience. Developers can write and maintain their docs the same way they do their code: with a text editor, git, and a remote repository.
For most teams, these UX upgrades have been worth sacrificing things like discovery, search, context, and the non-developer UX. But with OpsLevel’s new Tech Docs capability, teams can have their cake and eat it too.
Tech Docs in OpsLevel
With Tech Docs, developers can continue authoring internal documentation via their existing docs-as-code workflows. Docs continue to live in repos as markdown files. But the docs consumer experience is radically improved.
OpsLevel automatically imports, indexes, and renders markdown files from git repos linked to cataloged services.
So all OpsLevel users can now browse or search info that was previously siloed across hundreds of git repos—all within the context of your existing catalog.
With Tech Docs in OpsLevel, internal docs consumers no longer need to think “where should I look?” before asking a question or beginning a search. It’s all at their fingertips.
Whatever the use case—high pressure incident response, new feature development, or standard operations—say goodbye to weeding through multiple sources of info to find the answers you need to get work done.
Trust but verify
Tech Docs lets consumers find internal documentation faster and view those docs in the context of your metadata-rich service catalog. But how much should users trust what they find?
Of course, we can’t verify the accuracy of your internal documentation. But because we’re deeply integrated with your git repos, we can run Service Maturity checks against your docs.
Want to verify that your docs all use consistent filenames, have the same section headings, or don’t contain any `TODO` placeholders? These examples (any many more) are easily implemented with Repo Grep checks. Once you’ve identified which services have internal docs gaps, you can run a Campaign to encourage service owners to take corrective action.
Get started with Tech Docs today
Current customers can see the benefits of Tech Docs right away, with zero additional configuration required! OpsLevel is already a central place developers visit to find answers to questions about services in their architecture. Developers will now find answers to even more questions.
If you're not yet an OpsLevel customer, what are you waiting for? Get in touch and request your custom demo today!