Finding the ROI in DevOps

Written by: Bhavani Rao
5 min read

One of the challenges vexing IT managers and CIOs is that for all the investment in DevOps, it's hard to measure the benefits of DevOps let alone try to optimize it. In the digital transformation race, enterprises have adopted agile and lean methodologies and incorporated best-of-breed software delivery tools. However, the same nagging questions keep resurfacing again and again:

Where is the ROI in DevOps?

How do you measure DevOps effectiveness?

How can you improve on DevOps initiatives?

Measuring DevOps is challenging

The reality is that it's hard to improve what you can't measure. Unfortunately, DevOps, by design, does not come with an overall framework, there are no prescriptive metrics against which to measure the progress of your DevOps journey. When you do go about collecting metrics, the information needed from status lists, team meetings and change request tickets is not real time or simply not available. In addition, each development team may have different tools and has created its own take on various development processes. As a result, creating the relationship or context between applications, teams and their tools is difficult. When you put all this together, its evident that at the organizational level, there is little to no visibility into the end-to-end software delivery process. It becomes impossible to identify the critical path, let alone the dependencies and bottlenecks for development projects.

How are enterprises today attempting deliver more business value from DevOps and software delivery? Some end up investing small fortunes into hiring consultants to help streamline development, testing, and deployment efficiencies. Others try to gather as much information as they can from the individual tools in their continuous delivery pipelines; but with so many siloed tools across many different teams, there is no way to correlate all of the data with any sort of production pattern. It’s not that they don’t try to get intelligence out of their project and ticket management systems, development environments, testing tools, integration environments, and monitoring tools. But because there are so many disparate inputs, it’s impossible to manually correlate events with their causes.

Organizations need an easy way to measure, analyze and manage DevOps. They need a way to effectively identify and eliminate choke points, and reduce friction caused by flawed processes or improper resource allocations. Because it so hard to measure, it's difficult to have visibility into the who, what and when and where behind a snag to determine the how to fix. The key to improving a process is to measure where you are now and then create optimization goals.

How Cloudbees can help

CloudBees is in a unique position in the DevOps ecosystem. With nearly 1,400 integrations, CloudBees Jenkins solutions connect with nearly every DevOps tools in the market. CloudBees already has the data because we connect with tools in every stage of software delivery. This means that you don't have to change your way of doing business to collect metrics. As an orchestration platform, CloudBees Jenkins solutions are at heart of all the key events; what gets created, when, by whom, in what team, for what applications and deployed in what environment. CloudBees can use this data to assemble the relationships between applications, teams and tools to create a metrics driven approach to DevOps.

Introducing the DevOptics family

This is why CloudBees is investing in CloudBees DevOptics; a new family of products that leverages key software delivery metrics to optimize DevOps. This information provides visibility into the mechanics of continuous delivery teams; thereby, helping to improve work flows. These metrics in turn are going to fuel benefits that CloudBees DevOptics offers for CIOs and IT managers.

DevOptics identifies process improvements by capturing events as they happen and renders them into a live, organization-wide application delivery view. These insights can help you find dependencies in downstream and upstream activities as well as bottlenecks in process and tools. DevOptics by its very nature, can be your system of record for all development activities because it aggregates data from popular tools such as Github, JIRA and Jenkins. Nothing else is closer to the truth. Imagine the productivity to be gained having trustworthy information, fewer cross-team meeting and live updates on delivery status for every project. These insights drive broad organizational collaboration by removing the guesswork out of what broke, who broke it, where and when. DevOptics helps organizations assess their digital transformation initiatives by assessing DevOps productivity. IT can help drive the organization's business goals by identifying the best performing teams and leveraging their best practices organization-wide.

Every organization is at a different level of DevOps maturity. You may have come to a point in your DevOps journey where you don't know where to go. It's hard to tell what is the next step. CloudBees DevOptics can help CIOs and managers that want to get more of their DevOps investments. We invite you to sign up for a demo of DevOptics and start seeing DevOps from an entirely new perspective.

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