CloudBees has moved to bring some order to the potential DevOps chaos via an update to CloudBees DevOptics, a monitoring tool for tracking stages of the software delivery process in real time.
The update to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) application adds capabilities that identify everything from potential bottlenecks to periods of inactivity that might be better allocated to maintenance activities.
Michael Baldani, product marketing manager for CloudBees, said CloudBees DevOptics makes it possible to create benchmarks that track DevOps performance across the entire software delivery life cycle, including deployment frequencies, lead time to committing code into production environment, mean time to recover from failures and change failure rates. The “2017 State of DevOps Report” identifies these four most important metrics for a DevOps team to track.
Armed with those insights, a DevOps team is capable of drilling down into a specific issue to make more informed decisions concerning how best to optimize processes, said Baldani, noting that longer term, CloudBees DevOptics also sets the stage for eventually applying machine learning algorithms to processes.
The rate at which organizations have been making the transition to DevOps has been uneven at best. Much of that issue can be traced back to a lack of visibility into how specific processes are being employed, Baldani said. The analytics capabilities provided via CloudBees DevOptics should help organizations accelerate the transition to DevOps by enabling organizations to more easily identify areas where they need to optimize DevOps best practices, he said.
Traditional enterprise IT organizations are still wedded to legacy approaches to software development largely because of inertia. CloudBees DevOptics provides an analytics application that, in addition to helping optimize DevOps processes, provides access to dashboards through which a DevOps process can be shown conclusively to be more efficient than, for example, an existing waterfall approach.
Most organizations are embracing DevOps from the bottom up as individual teams launch various application development projects. As those teams start to deliver applications faster, it’s usually not too long before senior managers want to replicate that success across the rest of the organization. CloudBees DevOptics provides a mechanism through which the best practices implemented by various teams can be captured to facilitate sharing them with other teams. The biggest challenge facing most organizations today is not so much being convinced they can benefit from DevOps, but rather how precisely to go about it.
It may take a while longer for DevOps processes to become the most widely used approach to developing software in the enterprise. But as more organizations continue to appreciate how dependent they are on software to manage increasingly digital processes, the need to accelerate the rate at which software is being developed becomes more apparent. CloudBees is betting that access to real-time analytics will be a major factor in any decision to standardize on a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform by providing visibility into how software development ultimately impacts the business. After all, it’s now only a matter of time before some new or existing rival leverages software to create a competitive edge. In fact, it’s already been proven time and again that the rate at which organizations can create and deliver quality applications is critical to the overall customer experience.
