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Ontology

The ontology is your organization's knowledge graph - a living map of everything in your infrastructure and how it all connects.

What is the Ontology?​

Think of the ontology as a visual representation of your entire organization. Instead of hunting through wikis, Slack, and documentation to understand how things work, you have a single, always-up-to-date map that shows:

  • Every service, repository, deployment, and team member
  • How they relate to each other
  • Who owns what
  • What depends on what
  • When things change

Why It Matters​

LLMs only know what they've been trained on-general knowledge from the internet. To make AI work in your reality, the LLM needs to know what entities exist in your organization, how they connect to each other, and how they've changed over time. Only then can it provide grounded, hallucination-free insights about your specific infrastructure. The ontology gives AI this understanding, transforming generic language models into experts on your systems.

Traditional documentation goes stale the moment it's written. Wikis become outdated. Tribal knowledge lives in people's heads. The ontology solves this by automatically discovering and mapping your infrastructure in real-time.

For developers, it means understanding any codebase without interrupting senior engineers. See what depends on the code you're changing before you ship.

For operators, it means resolving incidents 70% faster. Know exactly what changed, who to page, and what the blast radius is.

For product teams, it means shipping with confidence. Understand which teams and customers are affected by your changes before they happen.

How It Works​

The ontology is built automatically through discovery. When you connect integrations like GitHub, AWS, or Kubernetes, SixDegree discovers entities (repositories, services, users, deployments) and maps the relationships between them.

These relationships tell the real story:

  • Repository A is deployed as Service B
  • Service B depends on Database C
  • Team X owns Service B
  • User Y is on-call for Service B

As your infrastructure changes, the ontology updates automatically. New deployments, code changes, and team movements all reflect immediately.

Exploring the Ontology​

The ontology appears as an interactive graph in your dashboard. Nodes represent entities like repositories or services. Lines between nodes show relationships like "deploys" or "depends on".

Click any node to see full details about that entity. See what it connects to, who owns it, and when it was last updated. Use search and filters to focus on specific areas of your infrastructure.

The graph reveals patterns you might not have known existed:

  • Orphaned services nobody maintains
  • Hidden dependencies that create risk
  • Bottleneck systems everything depends on
  • Team boundaries and collaboration patterns

Using the Ontology​

Understanding Architecture​

New to a codebase? Ask AI "show me the architecture of the payment service" and see the full picture - what it depends on, what depends on it, and how it's deployed.

Impact Analysis​

Before making changes, understand the blast radius. See every service, team, and customer affected by your proposed change.

Incident Response​

When production breaks, see exactly what changed in the last hour. Trace the chain from deployment to service to the team responsible.

Finding Owners​

No more hunting through CODEOWNERS files or Slack messages. Every entity in the ontology shows current ownership, on-call contacts, and recent contributors.

The Ontology Grows With You​

As you add more integrations, the ontology becomes more complete:

  • Start with GitHub to map code and teams
  • Add AWS to see infrastructure and deployments
  • Connect Kubernetes to track runtime services
  • Integrate PagerDuty to map on-call responsibilities
  • Add Datadog to link monitoring and alerts

Each integration adds another layer to your organizational map, creating a complete picture of how everything works together.

Real-Time Updates​

The ontology isn't a snapshot - it's a living system that updates as your infrastructure changes:

  • New services appear when deployed
  • Relationships update when dependencies change
  • Ownership shifts when teams reorganize
  • Deployments reflect immediately

You always have an accurate view of your organization, not a stale document from last quarter.

Next Steps​