The fatal flaw in most developer portals (and how to escape it)

Every engineering organization is unique. Your service architecture reflects years of business decisions, technical constraints, and organizational evolution. You have infrastructure components that matter, business metrics that drive decisions, and team structures that don't fit standard templates.

Yet most Internal Developer Portals force you to choose: accept their predetermined data model or invest months in complex customization. Rigid schemas are designed for imaginary "typical" organizations that don't exist. Complex customization requires engineering teams you don't have. Either way, critical context gets lost, important relationships go unmapped, and your IDP becomes a reflection of vendor limitations rather than engineering reality.

Today, we're exploring custom data models, the second pillar in our "Configure Everything" approach to IDP flexibility. This powerful capability, along with our recently launched Custom Integrations, gives you complete control over how your engineering data is structured and organized.

The challenge: flexibility without engineering overhead

Platform teams consistently tell us about a common challenge: finding an IDP that can model their unique organizational structure without requiring massive engineering effort to custom build. The tradeoff shouldn't be between rigid vendor schemas and months of custom development.

Teams often describe situations like:

• "We need to track which services are revenue-critical and show that data prominently"
• "Our Kafka topics and databases are just as important as our services in our architecture"
• "We have custom team hierarchies that need to be reflected in our catalog structure"

This is exactly why we built OpsLevel's data modeling capabilities to be comprehensive and flexible from the ground up.

How custom data models work

OpsLevel's custom data models let you customize three key areas through simple configuration. No database migrations, no backend coding, no waiting for vendor feature requests:

Custom properties that capture your context

Add the fields that matter to your organization. Track business impact scores, compliance status, cost allocation, team ownership models. Whatever data points drive your engineering decisions.

Component types that match your stack

Go beyond services. Model infrastructure components like databases, queues, and networks as first-class citizens. Create component types for teams, environments, or business domains that represent everything important to your engineering organization.

Relationships that reflect reality

Define how your components actually connect. Map dependencies between services and databases, show which teams own which infrastructure, establish hierarchies between business domains and their services.

Real-world impact

The impact goes beyond just better data organization. When platform teams can model their actual architecture, they see immediate changes in how their engineering org operates.

Teams report faster incident response times because engineers can quickly find the right database or queue that's causing issues. Architecture reviews become data-driven conversations because business impact and technical dependencies are visible together. Compliance tracking moves from spreadsheets into the same system engineers use daily.

Most importantly, developers actually use the catalog because it reflects their reality rather than fighting against it.

Complete control with custom integrations

With custom integrations pulling data from any tool and custom data models structuring it your way, you get a complete picture. Pull JIRA issues as components with business impact scores. Model Terraform infrastructure with the metadata your platform team needs. Connect cost allocation directly to the services driving those costs.

Why this matters: avoiding bad tradeoffs

The data modeling landscape forces platform teams into difficult tradeoffs, but it doesn't have to be this way.

Complex "flexible" solutions promise extensive customization through blueprint frameworks and widget architectures. While technically flexible, this approach requires significant ongoing effort to configure and maintain. When everything is built on generic blueprints rather than purpose-built features, you get the complexity of DIY solutions with the cost constraints of vendor products. Worst of both worlds.

Rigid vendor schemas lock you into predetermined data models with limited customization options. Need to track business impact scores? Create custom component types? Model complex organizational relationships? You'll hit their limitations quickly and end up with workarounds that don't scale.

OpsLevel's approach delivers purpose-built data modeling capabilities that are both powerful and approachable. Complete schema flexibility through configuration, without the engineering overhead or vendor constraints.

Part of our "configure everything" vision

Custom data models represent the second pillar of OpsLevel's comprehensive approach to IDP flexibility. We're building something different while competitors force you to choose between rigid schemas or complex custom development.

OpsLevel enables you to configure everything across three key dimensions:

• Data models that reflect your architecture
• Integrations that connect any tool
• User experience that matches team workflows

We're flexible where you need it, structured where you don't. This delivers IDPs that adapt to your engineering reality rather than forcing you into vendor assumptions.

Getting started

Ready to model your engineering organization the way it actually works? OpsLevel's custom data modeling capabilities are available for all customers.

Questions? Book a quick call with our team. They can help you create data models that truly reflect your engineering reality.

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