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Service ownership, on-call, and docs live in a portal nobody can search, and the knowledge about those services lives everywhere else. This recipe turns a lightweight service-catalog portal into the one-stop shop: its catalog becomes searchable in Glean, and Glean's permission-aware search and chat come back into the portal itself.

Service catalogYAML + runbooks
Custom connectorIndexing API
Gleanpermission-aware index
Portal UIWeb SDK embed
A Glean instance where you can add a custom datasource
A Glean-issued Indexing API token
Node.js 18+ to run the portal app locally
1

Index the catalog: follow the connector recipe to push the portal's service catalog (services, owners, runbooks) into Glean with the Indexing API and the open-source indexing SDK. Verify a service shows up in Glean search.

2

Embed search and chat: follow the Embed search & chat recipe inside the portal — the Web SDK script tag, a search route, and a chat container.

3

Ground answers in the catalog: with the catalog indexed, chat answers questions like "who owns the payments service?" from the portal's own data — permission-aware, with citations back to the catalog entries.

The clonable portal starter repo is in progress — until it lands, this recipe composes the two linked recipes against your own portal or a plain Next.js app.

Take it further
Add an on-call answer card to the portal backed by a Platform API search call.
Extend the connector with incremental sync and identity mapping so catalog permissions mirror your org.
Wire the portal's "ask" box to open Glean Chat with the current service as context.

Copies a prompt your AI assistant can build from.

At a glance
SurfacesConnector SDK, Indexing API, Web SDK, Platform API
StatusShowcase
Time~30 min
Required scopes
SEARCHCHAT