Backstage Tech Insights #3: Setting Up Fact Retrievers

In the previous post, we installed the Tech Insights backend plugin. Now it is time to make it do something useful. Fact retrievers are the data collection layer of Tech Insights. They gather information about your catalog entities and store it as structured facts. Without fact retrievers, there is nothing for checks to evaluate. What is a fact retriever? A fact retriever is a function that: Runs on a defined schedule (e.g., every 15 minutes, every hour) Iterates over entities in the catalog Collects specific data points about each entity Stores those data points as facts Once facts are stored, checks can evaluate them. ...

March 21, 2026 · 9 min · Suraj Narwade