Since this guide was first published in 2021, the conversation around Internal Developer Portals has changed dramatically. Back then, the focus was on the promise of building your own IDP with an open-source framework like Backstage. Today, the industry has a much deeper understanding of the significant, ongoing engineering investment required to run, maintain, and drive adoption for a DIY solution.
If you've already started your Backstage journey and are now facing the challenge of making it truly useful for your organization, this guide is for you. It walks through the key steps required to "supercharge" your instance. But as you read, it's also critical to consider the total cost of ownership you're undertaking, and why the market is increasingly shifting towards turnkey solutions.
Adding plugins to Backstage
Plugins, which are implemented using React components, are the basic unit of functionality in Backstage. You can think of Backstage as a single-page application composed of plugins with relevant features for each service in your catalog. There are a variety of plugins available on Backstage.io to choose from, or you can build your own! Here are some of the most popular ones:
Backstage Scaffolder
Backstage has direct support for writing service templates using the Scaffolder plugin. It also has built-in actions for publishing new services to a hosted git repository.
Datadog
Datadog is a tool for application metrics, alerting, and logs. With the Datadog Backstage plugin, you can embed graphs with the most critical metrics directly into your service catalog.
Kubernetes
With the K8s Backstage plugin, product engineers can check on the health of their services by viewing the state of deployments, pods, and ReplicaSets.
Cortex Scorecards
Scorecards are a popular feature in Cortex that provides quality tracking across services. Using the Cortex plugin, you can see Scorecards directly in your Backstage instance.
Custom plugins
If your team has developed internal tooling, you can build a custom plugin and add it to Backstage. Backstage becomes more powerful as you add plug-ins with functionality like changing feature flags, triggering deployments, or kicking off maintenance jobs.
Organizing your Backstage instance
In addition to adding features to Backstage through plugins, you’ll want to spend some time organizing your catalog in a way that reflects the operating structure of your company.
Teams
In order to display which teams and individuals own each service, you’ll need to import org data into Backstage. Backstage offers convenient integrations with Github as well as any LDAP-compatible service to ingest this data.
Auth
Once you’ve imported your users into Backstage, you’ll also want to configure authentication. Backstage has integrations with numerous authentication providers including Auth0, Github, Google, Okta, and OneLogin, among others.
Catalog Structure
As you add services to your catalog, you’ll want to think about how to organize them. We recommend organizing services by business systems rather than by teams. This approach will help clarify your company’s microservice architecture and illuminate the chain of service dependencies.
Search
The last part of organizing your Backstage instance is to implement search. Backstage provides an interface to three search backends: Lunr, ElasticSearch, and Postgres. Configuring search will take some setup, but it is well worth the effort.
Understanding the total cost of ownership
As this guide illustrates, going beyond a "vanilla" Backstage instance is a significant software development project in itself. The features described above—plugins, auth, search, catalog organization—all require dedicated engineering time to build and maintain. For organizations evaluating their long-term IDP strategy, it's critical to understand the real-world challenges that are now widely understood in the industry.
Significant engineering overhead: Backstage is a framework, not a turnkey solution. It demands substantial, ongoing engineering investment to build, customize, and maintain. Many organizations find this diverts valuable resources from their core product.
The 9% adoption problem: A catalog is not enough to drive change. Backstage lacks the built-in engineering intelligence and initiative-tracking that gives a broader set of stakeholders a reason to log in. As a result, adoption frequently stalls at less than 10%.
Missing fundamentals: A successful IDP must be built on a foundation of trusted, always-up-to-date data like service ownership. Backstage does not solve this problem out of the box, meaning its data can quickly become stale and untrustworthy, which prevents the IDP from being used for critical initiatives.
From running Backstage to driving results
Running a mature Backstage instance is a full-time job that typically requires at least 4 full-time engineers. For teams that want to achieve the outcomes of a world-class IDP without taking on the burden of building one, Cortex provides a turnkey solution that delivers value on day one.
According to Gartner's 2025 Market Guide for Internal Developer Portals, the market is now shifting to commercial IDPs that "simplify initial deployment, ease the ongoing maintenance, and provide out-of-the-box functionality... to realize faster return on investment."
Don't lose the work you've already done. With the Cortex Backstage Migration Helper, you can import your existing YAMLs in minutes and immediately start driving adoption and engineering excellence with Scorecards, Initiatives, and Engineering Intelligence.
Ready to see Cortex in action? Take a peek at our self-guided tour, or schedule a demo with our team.
