Software Catalog as a Product: 4 Use Cases

Modern software development requires fast delivery cycles but organizations have to cope with common pain points that hinder innovation and slow down workflows. Challenges include redundancies, poor visibility, unclear ownership and struggling onboarding.

A software catalog is a foundational component of internal developer platforms (IDPs) that helps developers centralize, discover and manage all the assets of an enterprise ecosystem, both the organization’s own resources and those belonging to its customers. The software catalog benefits organizations in many diverse scenarios, improving numerous aspects from discovery and application reuse to compliance and governance.

Basically, a software catalog acting as a product can optimize the entire software life cycle by ensuring governance, mitigating risk, accelerating delivery and, finally, enhancing productivity.

1. Software Catalog as a Product: Discovery for Troubleshooting

Discovery is a major capability of a software catalog, serving as the single source of truth for all the assets across the organization. For instance, organizations often struggle with incident management, wasting critical time during outages or security threats because they lack a unified view of their landscape. A software catalog can highlight accountability, strengthen reliability and ensure cybersecurity.

However, the true challenge of discoverability doesn’t lie in generating a massive, static inventory, but in giving real-time answers to critical questions about the entire software stack: its content, where it operates and how it interacts with everything else in the environment. This visibility then allows developers to assess how it behaves—is it reliable? Is it secure?—and ultimately, how it impacts the business, clarifying the true risk profile of every component. 

Here follows one use case of Mia-Platform being a solution to a troubleshooting problem:

• The struggle: Marco is a site reliability engineer (SRE). At 2:00 AM, a critical service fails. Marco has no instant access to service ownership, dependencies or recent changes. This chaos leads to a 45-minute-long “war room” just to locate the right people and the potential cause.
• Rapid impact assessment: The catalog links the alert directly to the service, instantly showing the owner (Team Identity) and, most importantly, a visual dependency map to define the exact blast radius.
• Guided resolution: The embedded, up-to-date Runbook skips irrelevant steps and directs Marco to a solution, accelerating time-to-fix with high reliability.
• Root cause visibility: Marco uses the catalog’s comprehensive visibility to review recent deployments and configuration changes, pinpointing the JWT token misconfiguration in minutes.
• Outcome: Ideally, the mean time to resolution (MTTR) can be reduced by over 70% (from 45 minutes to less than 5 minutes), minimizing customer impact and ensuring system reliability.

2. Software Catalog as a Product: Compliance Assessment (NIS2)

Compliance is the use case that turns abstract regulatory demands into measurable technical reality. Its primary goals are to accelerate time-to-value by preventing compliance bottlenecks and to ensure consistent standardization across the entire software ecosystem. Without a software catalog, organizations face a critical, perennial challenge: they struggle the most with compliance to evolving regulations and standards because of the inherent organizational chaos—a shadowy inventory. Luckily, a platform with a dynamic catalog addresses this chaos by facilitating a continuous, real-time audit trail.

This use case focuses on compliance assessment, especially in the context of stringent regulatory audits such as NIS2:

• The struggle: Chiara is a chief information security officer (CISO). She usually manages compliance cases (like NIS2) using decentralized Excel sheets and Word documents. Her team has to manually interview every development team and check logs to verify standards. The process is slow, often outdated as soon as it’s compiled, leading to an extremely high risk of non-compliance during audits.
• The transformation: The IDP, powered by a comprehensive software catalog, integrates compliance by design into the very foundation of the platform. Chiara defines a “NIS2-Compliant Scorecard” directly within the Mia-Platform console.
• Automated verification: The Scorecard instantly and automatically checks for key controls:
  • Supply chain security: It verifies that the service uses only approved images and checks the pipeline for a valid SBOM (Software Bill of Materials).
  • Encryption and logging: It confirms that the code only uses approved cryptographic libraries and that the service has the correct SIEM logging configuration.
  • Incident readiness: It ensures every service page is linked to a mandatory Incident Response Plan.
• Preventative design: Developers who create a new service rely on curated templates (scaffolders) that automatically include all required compliance settings, libraries and logging, drastically facilitating compliance.
• Audit at a glance: When an auditor arrives, Chiara pulls up a single dashboard to show the real-time adherence score for every service. She can scrutinize individual service details and historical compliance with a single click.
• Outcome: Compliance becomes a proactive, automated activity throughout the entire service life cycle. Chiara gains actionable, real-time vision into the organization’s compliance state, significantly reducing the risk of sanctions. In this case, essentially, the catalog centralizes and updates the software services, components and their attributes, fostering the use of dashboards and curated templates that embed all mandated compliance settings.

3. Software Catalog as a Product: Composability and Reuse

Reuse is a strategic use case that maximizes velocity by ensuring developers don’t repeatedly solve the same problem. Its key goals are significantly improving time-to-value and driving true component reuse for runtime, not just for copying code. Organizations that lack a dynamic software catalog struggle frequently with slow onboarding and duplicated applications, unnecessarily wasting time and budget. The catalog addresses these issues by giving immediate visibility into ready-made internal services and standardized libraries that foster reuse.

Here is an example of developers harnessing Mia-Platform for composability and reuse:

• The struggle: Luca is a developer. He needs to add a PDF export function but doesn’t know if a solution already exists. His message asking for help gets lost in Slack noise. He wastes days researching a new library, evaluating it and implementing the feature from scratch, leading to code duplication and needless effort.
• The transformation: Luca asks directly to Mia-Assistant—an AI companion integrated into Mia-Platform console—a natural language question: “What is the standard way to generate a PDF from data?”
• Instant component discovery: Mia-Assistant immediately identifies the “pdf-generator-service,” names the owner (Core Services Team), and provides a direct link to the documentation, offering the recommended, standardized solution.
• Alternative pathway: For more complex needs, the AI companion also suggests an alternative, the “reporting-api” for asynchronous export, ensuring the best solution for the developer’s specific context.
• Outcome: Luca finds the optimal, standardized solution in 30 seconds instead of 2 days. This instant access to enterprise knowledge promotes reuse for runtime and accelerates time-to-value across the organization.

4. Software Catalog as a Product: Governance for Security Control

Governance is the essential use case that standardizes rules across the organization, ensuring quality and alignment while reducing fragmentation and minimizing risks. An IDP with a software catalog acts as a policy engine, instantly answering questions such as: Is this service healthy enough for production? Has it been through the necessary review gates? Does it meet the minimum required operational quality standards? By embedding policy enforcement and quality checks directly into the IDP, governance shifts from a bureaucratic overhead to an automated railroad, empowering teams to move fast while staying within defined organizational guardrails, especially in the context of agentic AI.

The following case deals with AI governance and security control:

• The struggle: Developers want to be speedy and productive, so they create “Shadow AI” by signing up for external AI services (like OpenAI) using personal credit cards or unapproved open-source models. This unrestrained fragmentation results in huge, unforeseen risks: data leakage (sending sensitive data to external servers), intellectual property loss and uncontrolled costs.
• The transformation: Valeria is a Platform Owner. She uses Mia-Platform as a secure fence for a centralized AI Gateway, then creates a section within the software catalog of “Approved AI Services” (like Google Gemini via the corporate account).
• Enforced routing and control: The catalog-defined AI Gateway filters all AI requests, acting as a policy engine. This ensures:
  • Strict routing: Calls to unapproved vendors (like api.openai.com) are automatically blocked, eliminating the risk of unapproved access.
  • Data loss prevention (DLP): The Gateway inspects all requests and masks sensitive information (like credit card numbers) before they leave the corporate perimeter.
  • Credential management: The Gateway manages all API keys, preventing developers from placing sensitive credentials in their code.
• Visibility and budget control: Valeria gains a centralized dashboard that shows real-time metrics on AI consumption (for example, token usage and associated costs), enabling budget control and mitigating huge, unpredictable bills.
• Outcome: The organization can embrace AI innovation with a clear, safe and controlled path that mitigates the risk of data leakage and uncontrolled costs by design. Developers have a secure, preapproved component, consequently speeding up time-to-value.

Takeaways

As internal developer platforms expand, modern companies encounter increasingly complex project management challenges related to the discovery and management of assets. The software catalog is a fundamental element of advanced IDPs that provides unmatched visibility and actionable insights into asset ownership, dependencies and versions, among other things. 

Mia-Platform has a curated, dynamic software catalog to address multiple use cases due to its versatility and AI readiness, thus boosting production with the confidence of control. Take advantage of a mature, AI-native developer platform to streamline your developer experience, hold off chaos and enhance overall productivity.

Find out this video and learn how to dynamically add real-time APIs directly to your software catalog within Mia-Platform console for smart agentic AI consumption!