What You Can Learn From the Hygieia Dashboard and Its Metrics

Aug 13, 2019

Over the last several years, software development companies have increasingly adopted DevOps workflows. According to one study, 10% of organizations had fully embraced DevOps in 2017 and 17% had in 2018.

In large part, this is due to the fact that DevOps workflows enable software development teams to ship releases faster and more frequently, respond to incidents faster, strengthen camaraderie through collaborative working, learn more skills by merging dev and ops responsibilities, and build stronger communities by regularly soliciting feedback from their user community—and letting that feedback inform the product roadmap.


Streamline your software delivery with Plutora!

Streamline your software delivery with Plutora!

Imagine a single dashboard managing all enterprise software delivery, boosting visibility, efficiency, and cutting costs. Experience Plutora's solutions today!

Imagine a single dashboard managing all enterprise software delivery, boosting visibility, efficiency, and cutting costs. Experience Plutora's solutions today!

What Is DevOps?

Simply put, DevOps is the process in which development and operations teams are merged into a cohesive unit to speed up development lifecycles by bringing tools, processes, and culture together in such a way that supports high-velocity releases.

Because of the benefits DevOps provides—and the fact that today’s leading organizations are increasingly adopting DevOps workflows, meaning others are likely to follow suit—it comes as no surprise that the global DevOps market is projected to reach $12.85 billion by 2025, growing 18.6% each year until then.

While the upside of DevOps is self-explanatory, the new approach to software development is not without its downsides—particularly as DevOps teams start to operate at scale. With so many moving parts to consider, and speed really being the underlying motivator for DevOps teams in the first place, it can be hard to gain visibility into the pipeline to see whether things stand at any given point in time.

Enter Hygieia, an open source dashboard built by the fine folks over at Capital One. The team over there created Hygieia to solve the visibility problem outlined above. As a result, DevOps teams have more insight into their development pipelines and can build better software.

What Is Hygieia?

Hygieia is a configurable DevOps dashboard that provides a near real-time consolidated view of the entire delivery pipeline.

hygieia

The tool, which pulls data from other DevOps tools in a company’s development pipeline, offers two distinct views: one for engineers and one for executives. With Hygieia, DevOps teams get an up-to-date view into the real-time status of their projects.

Everyone on a development team—or an executive team, for that matter, too—can look into status at their own leisure. As such, Hygieia helps increase workplace transparency while establishing feedback loops to help continuously improve development processes.

What Metrics Can You See in the Hygieia Dashboard?

Hygieia gives engineering teams and managers deep visibility into the entire continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. As such, the open source tool provides a number of benefits to DevOps teams, including insight into:

  • The stories the teams are working on, where they stand, and how many have been completed

  • The volume of code being contributed, the frequency of those contributions, and the teams and individuals responsible for them

  • The number of builds taking place, how many of them are failing, and what broke each build

  • Static code analysis, security scans, unit test case results and test coverage functional test case results, and more

  • Various environment and code deployment statuses in each of them

  • The deployment pipeline that provides clear insight into which version of a piece of software was deployed in which environment and whether it failed

  • How code moves through the development lifecycle (e.g., from commit to build, to deployment, to QA, etc.) 

hygieia

The Capital One team is an open source-first organization and has continued to update Hygieia since it was first released in 2015.

What Are the Benefits of Hygieia?

For many companies, employees work around the globe. Traditional working hours don’t exist. As such, coordinating massive software development projects across time zones can be an extremely challenging ordeal. With so many moving parts, it can be difficult for everyone to stay on the same page. It’s not uncommon for at least some of those moving parts to get lost in the mix.

By providing a complete view of the entire development pipeline—from story to code deployment in production—Hygieia makes it that much easier to see whether something is broken. If so, a member of the development team, can take fast steps to fix it.

Beyond that, Hygieia can help DevOps teams determine whether certain features or products are low quality. Armed with that information, they can decide to prioritize certain patches and fixes in the next sprint. 

The dashboard can also help teams figure out whether there is anything in their development processes that is holding them back. For example, they might see that test cases are taking too long to complete, That slows down the entire DevOps lifecycle.

Despite these benefits, Hygieia is not as customizable as you might hope. After all, every DevOps team approaches software development differently. There might be a few tools that almost everyone uses (we’re looking at you, Jenkins!). But for the most part, every DevOps tool suite is at least somewhat unique. 

To be fair, the Capital One team continues to innovate with Hygieia, so more customization may be built into the product in the future. For DevOps teams that prefer a more customized look into their pipelines, other options may be more beneficial. 

What Metrics Can You See in the Plutora Dashboard?

We might be a bit biased here. But we believe that Plutora is the most helpful dashboard for today’s leading DevOps teams. At a very simple level, it’s a much more customizable platform that also supports analytics-style delivery.

Here’s a brief overview of some of the metrics you can track with Plutora’s value stream management platform:

  • Decision-making and analytics, including value stream mapping, deep analytics, and comparative metrics, AI-powered predictive insights, audit and governance, pipeline oversight and traceability, and real-time collaboration

  • Management and orchestration, including release management and pipeline orchestration, hybrid environment management, and deployment management and orchestration

  • Integration and common data model, including tools integrations, normalized data models, and converged toolchains.'=

Plutora delivers a number of benefits to DevOps teams like yours, including:

  • Accelerated delivery. Visualize metrics to eliminate clutter and waste from your development processes and identify constraints. Facilitate stronger collaboration between teams to move projects head faster.

  • Increased visibility. Enjoy complete visibility into your pipeline without having to hop from one interface to the next to increase productivity and have a better idea where things stand at any given point in time.

  • Scalability. Continuously optimize your DevOps processes by analyzing where things are working and where they need to be improved so that your team remains productive and effective even while you scale.

  • Improved governance. Know exactly who owns what by defining hierarchical release with phases, dependencies, criteria gates, and milestones. Make sure nothing slips through the cracks while ensuring compliance along the way.

Supercharge Your DevOps Workflows With Plutora

Does your DevOps team have enough visibility into its production pipeline and workflows? If not, a platform like Plutora can help. Plutora provides a DevOps Dashboard that measures the throughput and stability of your software delivery process, identifying trends in productivity, quality, responsiveness, and predictability of work.

Devops Dashboard

Schedule a demo today to see how your DevOps team can use Plutora to push out more feature-packed releases more frequently—delighting your users and inspiring your engineers along the way.

P.S. We also have other tools that support things like release management, test environment management, deployment planning, and predictive analytics you might want to take a look at. Plutora also supports a number of integrations you may also be interested in checking out.

Deliver Better Software Faster with Plutora

Deliver Better Software Faster with Plutora

Deliver Better Software Faster with Plutora