News

CI/CD Dev Platform Provider CircleCI Unveils 'Insights' Dashboard

• By John K. Waters
• October 1, 2020

Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform provider CircleCI today rolled out a new comprehensive dashboard feature designed to provide an overview of the health and usage of its customers' repository build processes. The new Insights dashboard was developed to enable users to make better engineering decisions by providing time-series data overviews of credit usage, success rates, pipeline duration, and other pertinent information.

CircleCI's namesake CI/CD platform automates software delivery at scale, allowing teams to build, test, and deploy software quickly, which allows engineering organizations to focus on delivering value to users. With CircleCI, teams don't have to worry about maintaining complex and fragile build systems, the company says, and can focus on shipping code to their customers.

The platform sits at the heart of the software delivery process, which gives it a unique visibility into how code moves from version control to production. The practice of CI/CD alone has improved engineering team performance and velocity greatly since it moved from the bleeding edge to the mainstream. This new dashboard view potentially adds another layer of support that will help teams find problems, make improvements, and deliver better products.    

The Insights dashboard gives teams a single place to benchmark and understand their processes over time, the company says. Future versions of the Insights dashboard will allow team leaders to benchmark the performance of their team compared to similarly sized organizations, surface optimization recommendations and automated actions using artificial intelligence (AI), and provide deeper analytical insights needed to evaluate long-term trends, the company says.

"Until now, it's been incredibly difficult to get a pulse on the development process," said Jim Rose, CircleCI CEO, in a statement. "Customers were asking, 'How fast are we? How resilient are we? How quickly can we recover?', but didn't have easy access to the data. With our new Insights dashboard, our customers can clearly see trends and performance history, and pinpoint opportunities for improvement."

Teams will be able to use the dashboard to cut build times in their organizations by finding and addressing code failures faster, pinpointing the source of bugs or security threats quicker, and accurately forecasting trends and patterns for complete workflow optimization, Rose said.

The company expanded its ecosystem last month with the introduction of the CircleCI developer hub, a dedicated resource library to help engineering teams at companies of all sizes maintain evolving software stacks and optimize CI/CD pipelines.