Five CI Tools, One Control Plane: Finally Answer “What’s Going On?”

On a Tuesday afternoon, three weeks before an audit, Alex snapped.

As Head of Platform Engineering, she was staring at five different CI tools - GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, Bitbucket, CloudBees CI - trying to answer what sounds like a simple ask from the CISO:

“We need one solid view of: security coverage, apps behind on policy, and where CI is slowing us down.”

Instead, she had five dashboards, ten CSV exports, and a flood of Slack messages asking “Can you grab a screenshot?”

If that scenario feels uncomfortably familiar, this story is about you.

Now is not the time to rip everything out and start over. You don’t have time for that. You need a way to see and govern the ones you already have.

That’s what CloudBees Unify is for and it’s exactly what we unpack in our guide, “What Changes When You Connect to CloudBees Unify.”

CloudBees Unify connects to your existing CI and source code tools, like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, Bitbucket, CloudBees CI, etc. and sits on top as a DevOps context and control plane.

Pipelines keep running where they run today. You’re not rewriting YAML, Jenkinsfiles, or scripts. You’re adding a layer of:

• Shared visibility

• Centralized policy

• Durable audit and traceability

So you can finally answer “what’s going on?” without opening five tabs.

When you connect to Unify, your teams:

• Use the same repos, pipelines, and scripts

• Trigger builds and releases in the same tools and UIs

• Dive into the same logs when something breaks

Unify doesn’t replace their CI. It:

• Collects run results, tests, artifacts, and security signals

• Links straight back into native logs and job views when they need detail

No massive migration. No “stop everything while we move.” You simply start getting a unified picture from the moment you connect.

In the guide: a simple breakdown of what does and doesn’t change when you connect Unify, so you can set expectations with your developers and leadership up front.

Once Unify is in the loop, your job as a platform and DevOps leader gets a lot clearer.

1. One view instead of five

You get a single pane of glass across all your CI tools:

• Unified runs, tests, artifacts, security data

• Consistent DORA and Flow metrics, regardless of underlying CI

You stop reconciling dashboards and start talking about action.

2. Policy once, enforced everywhere

You define centralized policies, including approvals, test minimums, and security standards, and Unify enforces them across Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, and more, with an end-to-end audit trail on every run.

3. Evidence that gathers itself

Tests, approvals, and security checks become attached evidence on each run. Audits pull from a live trail instead of screenshot hunts and log archaeology.

4. Artifacts with a memory

Every artifact can tell you:

• Which commit produced it

• Which tests and scans validated it

• Which policies it passed

• How it was released to each environment

Incidents go from detective work to decision-making.

See ROI from day 1 and scale from there.

Day 1 – Connect one critical service
Pick a noisy or business-critical app, connect its CI tools, and get a unified view with failures, tests, and logs linked together.

Week 1 – Give teams the same story
Extend to a handful of top services and quickly see which tests, flows, and services are really slowing you down.

Day 30–90 – From reporting to steering
Scale out policies, audit trails, and metrics so you can steer with data instead of stitching it together.

You keep your tools and lose the sprawl by consolidating visibility across the stack.

In the guide: a practical 30–60–90-day rollout plan, key metrics to track, and a checklist you can bring to your next planning meeting.

If you recognize yourself in Alex, here’s a simple path forward:

1. Pick one high-impact service.

2. Imagine connecting its CI tools to a single control plane.

3. Decide what you’d want to see on Day 1, Week 1, and Day 90.

We’ve laid out exactly how that can look in real organizations.