Missing entity Backend

Welcome to the missing entity backend plugin!

Setup

Up and Running

Here's how to get the backend up and running:

1. First we need to add the @dweber019/backstage-plugin-missing-entity-backend package to your backend:

   # From the Backstage root directory
   yarn --cwd packages/backend add @dweber019/backstage-plugin-missing-entity-backend

2. In your packages/backend/src/index.ts make the following changes:

     import { createBackend } from '@backstage/backend-defaults';
      
     const backend = createBackend();
      
     // ... other feature additions
      
   + backend.add(import('@dweber019/backstage-plugin-missing-entity-backend'));
      
     backend.start();

The plugin options can be set through the app-config.yaml:

missingEntity:
  schedule:
    frequency:
      minutes: 60
    timeout:
      minutes: 2
    initialDelay:
      seconds: 15
  age:
    days: 3
  batchSize: 2 # Default 500
  kindAndType: [ { kind: 'Component' }, { kind: 'Resource', type: 'db' }] # See config.d.ts for default
  excludeKindAndType: [] # See config.d.ts for default

Plugin Option

Batch Size

The missing entity backend is setup to process entities by acting as a queue where it will pull down all the applicable entities from the catalog and add them to it's database (saving just the entityRef). Then it will grab the n oldest entities that have not been processed to process them.

By default, 500 entities are pull and processed in 60 minutes (see config above). This means for every entity there is around 7 seconds to get the relations and check them.

Refresh

The default setup will only check missing entities once when processed. If you want this process to also refresh the data you can do so by adding the age.

It's recommended that if you choose to use this configuration to set it to 3 days to update stale data.

Limitations

Relation limit

Currently, we only process the first 1000 relation per entity.