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015 - Management Plane
Last Modified: May 12th, 2026
Title: Establishment of a Centralized Management Plane
Status: Proposed
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Context
The platform team currently manages fragmented visibility across multiple disconnected systems. Operational metrics, system logs, and resource data are siloed, requiring manual effort to aggregate status reports for different stakeholders. To resolve this, we are establishing a "Management Plane"—a centralized interface for operational statistics and platform data. The immediate priority and first confirmed module for this plane is the Bulk User Import logs, which will provide transparent visibility into migration progress. The research and discovery parameters for this initiative are:
- Users: Platform engineers, development teams, management, and customers.
- Primary Purpose: Centralization of operational statistics and process logs.
- Data Scope: Aggregated AWS resource metrics, pipeline statuses, and team activity.
- Control Level: Initial implementation is strictly read-only.
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Decision
We will build the Management Plane using OutSystems as the primary technology stack. The platform will act as a unified dashboard layer, consuming data from custom AWS Lambda-based collection pipelines and leveraging AWS Config as a primary source for resource state.
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Rationale
The decision to utilize OutSystems for a centralized management plane is based on the following:
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1. Strategic Value of a Management Plane
- Centralized Operational Visibility: By starting with Bulk User Import logs, we address a high-friction area where stakeholders currently lack self-service visibility. This provides a single point of truth for process status.
- Data Aggregation: The plane allows us to correlate technical AWS resource metrics with specific platform events. This contextual view is more actionable than raw telemetry found in tools like CloudWatch or Datadog.
- Safe Stakeholder Access: A dedicated interface allows management and customers to view operational health without requiring direct access to the AWS Console or sensitive backend logs.
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2. Selection of OutSystems
- Rapid Delivery: OutSystems is our core tech stack, providing the fastest path to a functional UI for the Bulk User Import logs. This avoids the heavy "lift" of managing a new frontend framework.
- Integration Maturity: The platform provides robust patterns for integrating with AWS services via REST APIs. This is essential for ingesting data from the planned Lambda-based collection pipelines.
- Maintenance Efficiency: Leveraging existing internal expertise ensures the management plane can be maintained and updated without introducing technological debt or requiring specialized new hires.
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3. Potential Future Scope
- Developer Lifecycle Management: While the initial focus is on read-only visibility, there is a potential future use case for the management plane to serve as a centralized hub for provisioning and deprovisioning developers. This would involve orchestration between identity providers (IdP), AWS IAM and Workspaces but remains a talking point for future roadmap discussions rather than a confirmed requirement for the initial build.
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Implications
- Read-Only Security: The initial phase will be strictly read-only to minimize risk and focus on data accuracy.
- Complementary Tooling: This plane serves as an aggregation and reporting layer; it is not intended to replace Datadog for real-time alerting or deep-dive performance debugging.
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Key Evaluation Metrics
The success of the Management Plane will be measured based on its overall impact on platform operations and stakeholder engagement:
- Reduction in Manual Reporting: A measurable decrease in the time the platform team spends generating manual status reports or answering "status check" inquiries for stakeholders.
- Platform Adoption Rate: The number of unique weekly active users (WAUs) across the target personas (Platform, Management, Customers) interacting with the plane.
- Data Consistency: The alignment between the statistics surfaced in the Management Plane and the underlying source-of-truth logs in AWS (aiming for 100% accuracy).
- Operational MTTV (Mean Time to Visibility): A reduction in the time it takes for a stakeholder to find a specific operational data point or log status compared to the current fragmented baseline.
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Conclusion
Building the Management Plane in OutSystems, starting with Bulk User Import logs, provides a low-lift, high-impact solution for platform visibility. This approach proves the architecture with a critical use case while leaving the door open for future operational expansions like developer provisioning. Next Steps:
- Define the API schema for the Bulk User Import log integration.
- Design the OutSystems interface for both internal (Platform/Management) and external (Customer) personas.
- Validate the ingestion pipeline from AWS Config to the OutSystems data layer.