Best Practices for Internal Developer Portals: How to Build One That Scales

Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) are no longer a nice-to-have—they’re a core component of modern platform engineering strategies. As engineering organizations scale, so does complexity: fragmented tooling, inconsistent ownership, and growing friction between development and operations.

That’s where the best developer portals stand out. They streamline workflows, enforce software standards, and enable faster, safer shipping across teams.

But simply deploying an IDP doesn’t guarantee success. To truly realize the benefits, platform teams need to focus on implementation strategies that prioritize adoption, visibility, and value.

This article breaks down best practices for internal developer portals, based on research, real-world use cases, and lessons from OpsLevel customers.

Prioritize the Developer Experience

Developer adoption is the foundation of every successful internal developer portal. If developers don’t find it useful, it becomes shelfware.

Too many organizations focus on what the platform team needs without considering what developers need in their day-to-day workflows.

Why this matters: In a microservices environment, engineers are often slowed down by lack of visibility. They need answers to questions like:

• Who owns this service?
• Where are the SLOs or runbooks?
• Are there open vulnerabilities?

How to implement this best practice

• Interview a few developers before rolling out your portal. Ask them what frustrates them when shipping, debugging, or onboarding.
• Prioritize key use cases like discovering service ownership, surfacing CI/CD status, or triggering common workflows.
• Avoid a bloated UI. The best developer portals are fast, intuitive, and tightly integrated into daily engineering habits.

Example: ecobee used OpsLevel to centralize service information in one place. This improved developer onboarding and reduced time wasted on Slack or tribal knowledge. Their platform team built trust by solving real problems from day one.

Set Clear Goals and Success Metrics

Internal platforms often suffer from unclear scope. Teams try to serve every stakeholder—SREs, security, leadership—without aligning on a north star.

Successful internal developer portal rollouts start with one or two focused goals.

How to implement this best practice

• Identify the biggest productivity or reliability pain point. Examples include long lead time for new services, inconsistent ownership, or lack of service maturity.
• Tie that problem to a measurable outcome. For instance:
  • Decrease time to provision new services from days to hours
  • Improve software standards compliance across all microservices
  • Reduce MTTR by surfacing ownership and observability data
• Review metrics monthly to guide your roadmap.

Example: A mid-market SaaS company launched an IDP to improve production readiness. They used OpsLevel Scorecards to assess standards across services—things like alerting, SLOs, and on-call coverage. Within 8 weeks, they moved from 40% to 85% compliance.

Build a Reliable Service Catalog

The internal developer portal is only as useful as the accuracy of the data it shows. That starts with a trustworthy, up-to-date service catalog.

This is especially important in microservices-based architectures where ownership is distributed and visibility is hard to maintain.

How to implement this best practice:

• Integrate with GitHub/GitLab, Terraform, and CI/CD tools. Don’t rely on engineers to manually add or update services.
• Enrich services with metadata (bonus points if your IDP vendor does this automatically):
  • Owning team
  • Deployment frequency
  • Production tier
  • Slack channels and runbooks
• Use automated checks to flag missing owners, stale services, or outdated documentation.

Example: A FinTech company with 700+ microservices used OpsLevel to auto-detect services from Terraform and GitHub. By auto-assigning owners and ingesting CI metadata, they built a complete catalog without slowing down developers.

Introduce Self-Service Gradually

Internal developer portals shine when they reduce friction. A major way to do this is by enabling developer self-service for common operational tasks.

But self-service must be implemented carefully, with guardrails.

How to implement this best practice

• Start with low-risk, high-value workflows like:
  • Provisioning sandbox environments
  • Running security scans
  • Requesting secrets or credentials
• Wrap each workflow with clear approval steps, auditing, and expiration logic.
• Communicate how to use self-service responsibly.

Example: An enterprise SaaS company used OpsLevel Actions to let developers create staging environments on demand. This reduced support tickets by 80%, but also included automatic timeouts to manage cloud costs.

Make Software Standards Actionable

Enforcing software standards across dozens—or hundreds—of microservices can’t be done manually. Your portal should guide engineers toward compliance, not block them with rigid rules.

How to implement this best practice

• Use scorecards to show the maturity of each service across categories like:
  • Security (e.g. dependencies scanned, secrets detected)
  • Reliability (e.g. SLOs defined, alerting enabled)
  • Documentation (e.g. runbooks, API docs)
• Provide in-portal explanations for each standard, linking to internal guides or how-tos.
• Run campaigns to target specific gaps—like adding missing Snyk integrations or ensuring every service has an on-call rotation.

Example: A logistics tech company launched a 30-day campaign to improve Snyk coverage. With Scorecards, visibility into progress, and automated Slack nudges, they moved from 22% to 89% adoption across teams—with no manual follow-up needed.

Track and Report on Portal Impact

To secure long-term buy-in, platform teams must show that their developer portal is creating value. That means instrumenting usage and sharing progress.

How to implement this best practice

• Monitor KPIs such as:
  • % of services onboarded
  • Scorecard compliance by team
  • Usage of self-service workflows
  • Developer satisfaction (via NPS or feedback surveys)
• Build shareable dashboards that track adoption and maturity over time.
• Highlight wins in team meetings or company-wide updates.

Example: A healthcare SaaS company integrated OpsLevel with their BI tools to track maturity across services and teams. Their quarterly reviews now include a visual breakdown of progress toward engineering reliability goals.

Treat your Developer Portal Like a Real Product

The most effective developer portals aren’t launched once—they’re continuously improved based on feedback and usage. Treating your IDP like an internal product means building trust and momentum.

How to implement this best practice

• Assign a product owner for the portal within the platform or DevEx team.
• Maintain a changelog and internal roadmap to keep engineers informed.
• Actively collect feedback through surveys, Slack channels, and 1:1s.
• Market new features the same way you would for customer-facing products.

Example: One Series D startup held monthly “Portal Roadshows” where the platform team demoed new workflows, gathered input, and celebrated usage milestones. It kept momentum high and turned the portal into a core part of the engineering culture.

A Developer Portal Is a Platform Strategy, Not Just a Tool

Rolling out an internal developer portal isn’t about checking a box—it’s about building a long-term strategy for platform engineering, one that accelerates delivery while improving consistency, security, and team autonomy.

Whether your goal is to improve visibility across microservices, enforce software standards, or reduce operational overhead, these best practices will help you build a portal that developers love—and leadership supports.

Want to see how fast you can implement your own developer portal? Book a live demo to explore OpsLevel’s full platform.