Add API visualizations in Port with swagger UI, embedded URL and markdown information

Introduction

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Our goal is to add depth and breadth to the software catalog using visualizations that ensure that all the data is readily accessible within the software catalog. We want to save time for developers, so they don’t need to search hundreds of git repositories and other tools but rather immediately see everything they need. Developer tools are proliferating and this problem should grow as time goes by, and that’s exactly why visualizations in the context of the software catalog really come in handy.

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Here are the visualization features we just added:

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Markdown documentation visualization

Documentation about software and infrastructure is often scattered across different tools and systems (e.g. readme files inside the repository, knowledge base systems, pinned messages in Slack, etc). This makes life difficult for new developers and slows down their onboarding. Even senior developers may find it difficult to navigate areas in the system that are outside their ordinary work. 

Markdown visualization centralizes all the software/infrastructure documentation and displays it inside Port's developer portal, making it easily searchable and providing the information within the context of the relevant element in the software catalog, saving time and effort. 

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Open API - Swagger

Sometimes it’s difficult to find available APIs for a specific microservice. The place to discover those is in the software catalog, and we’ve released a new integration that enables this. In addition to searching and viewing API specifications, the Port user can also perform API requests right from Port’s UI.

You can now import and display OpenAPI specification files as Swagger UI tabs. 

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Embedded URLs

Developers’ daily work requires many tools: monitoring, analytics, logging, testing, code management and more. A significant level of context switching happens when developers move  between different tools, all with different interfaces and in different locations. 

Embedded URL visualizations incorporate all the specific tools within the context of the software catalog, from datadog monitoring for a specific microservice to the Grafana dashboard showing cluster metrics.

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How it all works

All visualizations are configured in the blueprint definition as one of the blueprint's properties and can be reported easily through the Port API and data exporters (these exports sync directly from git, and when a file is changed in the git repo, the change is automatically reflected in port.

Users can add as many markdown, API and embedded URL tabs as needed! 

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