​
About Private Apps

Tempest Private Apps allow you to extend the Tempest platform with custom integrations for your organization’s tools and workflows. This guide introduces Private Apps and covers their core capabilities, development approaches, and common use cases.

Want to spend more time building and less time reading? Jump right into our Quickstart guide to learn how to build your first Private App.

​
What is a Private App?

A Private App is a customized application that integrates with the Tempest platform to provide coverage for your organization’s specific tools and workflows. Each Private App:

  • Runs as a standalone service that communicates with Tempest via our API
  • Has full access to Tempest platform capabilities, just like first-party apps
  • Can be version controlled and deployed using your existing CI/CD pipelines
  • Maintains its own state and can be monitored using your existing observability tools

You can develop Private Apps using:

  • Our Go SDK and CLI: Provides a type-safe, maintainable way to build apps with full IDE support and automatic code generation
  • Our HTTP API: Enables integration with any language or framework that can make HTTP requests

Private Apps are built with code and work seamlessly with your existing infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform, CDK, and Pulumi.

​
Capabilities

Private Apps become a seamless part of your Tempest platform. You can:

Add new resources that can be configured and provisioned via recipes
Customize the resources and specific metadata that is synced into your software catalog
Create resources with custom installation instructions
Automatically include dynamic links to documentation and dashboards

​
Core Lifecycle Operations

Every Private App implements these basic operations:

OperationDescription
CreateCalled when users create resources in Tempest (typically via recipes). Handles initial provisioning and setup.
Read & ListCalled when Tempest syncs your resource metadata. Frequency determined by your plan.
UpdateHandles state changes and configuration updates for existing resources.
DeleteCalled when users delete resources. Handles cleanup and deprovisioning.

​
Additional Features

Private Apps also support these built-in capabilities:

OperationDescription
HealthchecksService discovery and healthchecks for the resources managed by your Private App.
InstructionsCustom installation instructions for your Private App resources.
LinksAdd links to your Private App resources for documentation, dashboards, endpoints, and more.
TaxonomyDefine how your Private App resources are categorized and organized.
Actions Custom user-triggerable actions for your Private App resources.

​
Common Use Cases

Private Apps can integrate with any tool controllable via your code. Here are some examples we’ve seen our customers use Private Apps for:

  • Add support creating ArgoCD application pipelines
  • Add support for creating a DataDog monitor and dashboard
  • Automatically add a tenant to an internal cluster

Have a use case but not sure how to build it? Contact us and we can help you build it.