Backstage Plugins — How to Extend Your Developer Portal

Backstage without plugins is an empty portal. With plugins, it’s a command center for all of engineering. Spotify created Backstage as an internal developer portal and open-sourced it in 2020. Since then, the community has built hundreds of plugins covering CI/CD, monitoring, cloud costs, documentation, and infrastructure. A properly configured Backstage becomes a single pane of glass where developers find everything from the service catalog to deployment status to on-call schedules.

Must-Have Plugins¶

• Kubernetes: Pod status, logs, events — developers see their deployment status without kubectl access
• GitHub/GitLab: PR status, CI pipeline results, code coverage directly in the service profile
• PagerDuty: On-call schedule, active incidents — who is responsible for the service right now
• Cost insights: Cloud spending per service — cost transparency for engineering teams
• Tech Radar: Technology decision visualization — adopt, trial, assess, hold

Each plugin adds widgets to the service profile. A developer opens their service page and sees deployment status, CI pipeline, logs, costs, and incidents all in one place.

Software Templates¶

The most powerful Backstage feature. A template defines a complete new service setup: Git repository, CI/CD pipeline, Kubernetes manifests, monitoring dashboards, and network policies. A developer clicks “New Service,” fills in the name and parameters, and has a production-ready setup meeting all company standards in 5 minutes. This eliminates the “golden path” problem — every team creates services consistently.

Custom Plugins¶

The Backstage plugin API enables creating custom plugins for internal tools and processes. Frontend plugins are React components, backend plugins are Express.js routers. For companies with proprietary internal systems (compliance, feature flags, experiment tracking), this is the path to integrating everything into one portal.

Plugins Make Backstage Valuable¶

Invest in selecting and configuring plugins. A well-configured Backstage with 10 key plugins = single pane of glass for all of engineering.