People & Process

DevOps KPI Dashboard: Making Metrics Work for Your Engineers

DevOps KPI Dashboard: Making Metrics Work for Your Engineers

How do the world’s best engineering teams maintain their high performance?

We believe that while there may be multiple factors, there is one common theme: they use dashboards that show the right metrics at the right time.

A well-designed DevOps (also known as platform engineering) dashboard brings together key performance indicators that matter for your team's success, helping everyone understand how work is flowing and where they might need to adjust. When used well, this leads to higher engineering performance.

Sections:

1. Understanding the Importance of DevOps KPI Dashboards

Software teams today work with an incredible amount of data – from code changes and pull requests to tickets and alerts, from deployment logs to team communications. Making sense of all this information can be overwhelming. That's why teams need tools that can transform this raw data into meaningful insights that everyone can understand and act on, from developers to business leaders; a thoughtful dashboard can do just that.

Stephen Few, Founder of a data visualization consultancy (Perceptual Edge) and world-class expert on data visualization defines a dashboard as: a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives which fits entirely on a single computer screen so it can be monitored at a glance.

Put simply, the real value of a dashboard is to help you answer key questions in a few seconds, like:

  • Is our work on track?
  • Where are our current bottlenecks?
  • How is each team progressing?

2. Aligning DevOps Goals with Business Objectives

For DevOps practices to drive real impact, they need to connect directly to business outcomes. Great engineering metrics do more than track technical performance – they show how your team's work creates value for customers and the organization.

Here's how to make that connection:

  • Choose Metrics that Matter: Look beyond technical metrics to include measures of customer satisfaction, business growth, and user impact. We explore  key DevOps KPIs here.
  • Build Shared Understanding: Work with business leaders to identify which metrics reflect organizational priorities. This alignment helps everyone understand how engineering work drives business success.
  • Set Achievable Goals: Create clear, measurable targets that motivate teams without overwhelming them. Focus on steady improvement rather than arbitrary numbers. As proof of that, if your team gets 1% better each day for one year, they'll end up 37 times better by the end.

3. Designing an Effective DevOps KPI Dashboard

Most DevOps dashboards serve a particular purpose. As it's become more important to understand, measure, and manage engineering productivity, we’ve seen 3 key archetypes emerge:

  1. Developer Activity Dashboards: These dashboards focus on specific developer contributions, tracking metrics like code commits, pull requests, or time spent on various tasks. At their best, they can help developers assess their own productivity and identify areas for improvement. However, these dashboards must be used with caution; the risk is that a leader would use an activity dashboard to stack-rank and fire people on a simplistic measure (like lines of code).  As we always say at Multitudes, the metrics aren't the "answer"; they're simply the starting point for a conversation. It's important to always bring in the human context alongside the data.
  2. Team Performance Dashboards: Centered around team dynamics, these dashboards track collaborative metrics such as code review times, feedback rates, and overall team velocity. They are designed to highlight how well the team is functioning as a unit, offering insights into areas like communication effectiveness and workload distribution. Team performance dashboards help leaders identify patterns in teamwork and ensure that collaboration processes remain efficient.
  3. Project Monitoring and Performance Dashboards: These dashboards provide a high-level overview of project health, tracking progress metrics like sprint completion rates, defect rates, and milestone achievements. They enable project managers and stakeholders to monitor project trajectory, identify risks, and make adjustments as needed. By focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to project goals, these dashboards help keep projects on track and aligned with strategic objectives.

At Multitudes, we focus on linking from engineering effort to key outcomes for teams and customers.  To help people use metrics to help and not harm, we also believe that it's important to put guardrails on what we measure, in line with our data ethics principles.

Case Study: Mentorloop reduced Out-of-Hours work by 90%+ using DevOps KPI Dashboard

At Mentorloop, monitoring and managing out-of-hours work became a priority to maintain team wellbeing and productivity. With a growing team of engineers at different experience levels, Head of Engineering Tracy Powell used Multitudes’s Dashboard insights to address spikes in out-of-hours activity.

Multitudes flagged when a new team member’s out-of-hours work spiked by 1200%.

This triggered a question in the Multitudes 1:1 guide, prompting Tracy to discuss workload and wellbeing with the new team member, and come up with a plan. Subsequently, they saw:

  • The new engineer’s out-of-hours work was reduced by 92% within a week.
  • The reduced workload remained consistent over the following weeks.
  • Over this period, Tracy used data from previous 1:1s to track progress and support sustainable working habits.

By leveraging Multitudes’s actionable dashboard, Mentorloop effectively reduced out-of-hours work, preventing burnout and supporting balanced productivity across the team.

4. Types of DevOps Dashboards solutions

When selecting a commercial tool to create a DevOps dashboard, organizations typically consider three main types:

  1. Open-Source Solutions
  2. Platform-Native Analytics
  3. Purpose-Built Engineering Insights Platforms

Let's dive into each category to understand their benefits and considerations.

Open-Source Solutions

Open-source tools like Google's Four Keys Project provide a flexible and cost-effective way to measure developer productivity. These solutions are ideal for organizations with the technical expertise to customize and maintain their own systems.

Key Benefits Considerations
Complete flexibility: Customize metrics and integrations to precisely fit your organization's needs.
Cost-effective: No licensing fees, reducing direct costs beyond initial implementation.
Community support: Leverage community-driven improvements, updates, and support resources.
Technical expertise required: Implementation and maintenance demand skilled personnel with experience in these tools.
Infrastructure investment: Requires investment in infrastructure and ongoing system monitoring.
Customization effort: May need significant customization to address specific use cases and integrate with existing workflows. Information and support for this will depend on what is available in the community.

Platform-Native Analytics

Many development platforms offer built-in analytics capabilities. Tools embedded within the platform integrate directly into your development workflow, providing immediate insights without additional setup (if you already use the tool).

Key Benefits Considerations
Instant setup: Zero setup time with automatic data collection from your existing projects.
Seamless integration: Native integration ensures smooth operation within your development environment.
Regular updates: Benefit from ongoing improvements as part of the platform's standard updates.
Ecosystem limitations: Analytics are confined to the platform's ecosystem, potentially limiting broader visibility.
Limited customization: Less flexibility to tailor metrics to your organization's unique requirements.
Coverage gaps: May not encompass all aspects of developer productivity, such as cross-platform activities or external tool integrations.

Purpose-Built Engineering Insights Platforms

Dedicated developer productivity platforms like Multitudes offer comprehensive solutions that combine technical metrics with human factors, such as team collaboration and code quality.

Key Benefits Considerations
Holistic insights: Provide a combined view of technical performance and human-centric metrics.
Pre-built integrations: Easily connect with common development tools like Jira, Slack, and others.
Dedicated support: Access to ongoing customer support and regular feature enhancements tailored to industry needs.
Additional investment: Involves licensing costs and potential training for team members to drive holistic understanding of delivery.
Workflow alignment: Requires evaluation to ensure compatibility with existing processes and tools.
Feature fit: Important to assess whether the platform's features align with your specific measurement goals and KPIs.

How to Choose the Right Tool?

Selecting the appropriate dashboard tool is important for successfully implementing and benefiting from these metrics. Key things to look out for in the tool:

  • Seamless integration with your existing DevOps tooling stack, including version control systems, CI/CD pipelines, and incident management platforms. Ensure the tool can accurately collect and process data from various sources without manual intervention.
  • Clear, actionable insights through their dashboards and reporting features.
  • Scalability to handle increased data volumes as your organization grows, and adhere to your security requirements and relevant industry regulations.
  • Values that align with your own organization's, so you know that you can trust the insights you get.

If you’re looking for some help choosing, you can book a free demo with Multitudes and chat with our team.

5. Use Multitudes as your DevOps KPI Dashboard

Use Multitudes as your DevOps KPI Dashboard

While dashboards provide valuable insights into DevOps performance, tracking these metrics alone isn't enough to drive meaningful improvement. The real value comes from taking action on these insights and implementing changes that lead to better performance.

Effective DevOps improvement requires a combination of measurement and action:

  • Converting metrics into actionable improvements, delivered in your team's workflow
  • Using benchmarks and targets to identify specific areas needing attention
  • Implementing tools that guide teams toward better practices

The key to success lies in how organizations implement and act on these metrics. Teams need tools that not only track metrics but also provide guidance on how to improve them. That’s the power of the Multitudes platform — with Multitudes, you can:

  • Automatically track all key DevOps KPIs such as DORA and SPACE metrics
  • Get visibility into work patterns and types of work, such as feature development vs. bug fixing
  • Receive automated nudges via Slack to drive towards action with evidence-backed suggestions

Ready to unlock happier, higher-performing teams that ship 25% faster?

Try our product today!

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