Why a Service Catalog Exists#
A service catalog answers: “What do we have, who owns it, and what state is it in?” Without one, this information lives in tribal knowledge and stale wiki pages. When an incident hits at 3 AM, the on-call engineer needs to know who owns the failing service, what it depends on, and where to find the runbook. The catalog provides this in seconds.
The catalog is also the foundation for other platform capabilities. Golden paths register outputs in it. Scorecards evaluate catalog entities. Self-service workflows provision resources linked to catalog entries.