Puppet has further extended its product lineup with the launch of Insights, an analytics package it reckons will tell customers if they’re doing DevOps, and whether they’re doing it right.

The company said the product includes “beautiful, easy-to-use dashboards and reports” giving teams “a bird’s-eye view of their organization…[so they ]can focus on improving the velocity, quality and impact of their software delivery cycles.”

More tangibly, while Puppet’s product line has ballooned from its automation heartland to a broad lineup of Dev and Ops tools, VP of product Matt Waxman said Insights would pull in feeds from the different tools customers are using, before correlating and analysing the data.

“We’re just pulling the data any user can get out of them. That’s not the value add,” he said. “It’s not a reporting product. It’s not just going to take the Jira data and show it in a different dashboard. It’s really about correlating that data with other data sources. That’s the magic.”

Waxman likened the result to “a universal language….like a credit rating” that will allow teams and senior execs to measure velocity, quality and ROI on their projects.

What underlies that score though? Waxman said it had incorporated the Puppet State of DevOps recommendations into the product.

So, for example, if the product shows “spikes in the performance of a particular team you can click on that and get a recommendation that goes  ‘hey, if you go containerize your builds environment you’ll be able to improve the speed with which you’re delivering’.”

The product released today is still beta, and the company has not announced pricing. Waxman said it would get feedback through the beta process and work out pricing accordingly.

Puppet has an increasingly deep relationship with analytics player Splunk. However, Waxman said Insights was unrelated right now. “Over time I expect we’ll get requests to go deeper into infrastructure, to be able to correlate that with application delivery bottlenecks. I think at that point there will be a variety of data sources we’ll want to pull in.”

The urge to compare has become rife in “DevOps” products, and if you can throw in machine learning even better. In the Summer, Electric Cloud announced its Foresight product, which it said embedded machine learning to highlight inefficiencies and bottlenecks in pipelines.

Puppet has chosen not to labour the ML/AI point. Waxman said “It’s a data product so there is certainly an element of big data analytics and having to correlate and putting some AI around to come up with a recommendation engine.”

For now, it measures performance within organisations, but clearly there is potential to aggregate data across multiple organisations. Waxman said “Ultimately that is where we see things going.”

For Puppet completists out, this week sees updates across the Puppet lineup, including the addition of a beta vulnerability remediation feature for Puppet Discovery – which has hit 1.6. Puppet Enterprise gets a 2019 designation with its latest version, while the CD feature hits 2.0. The automation tool Puppet Bolt hits 1.0, with tasks now publishable to the Puppet Forge, and with an extended language to allow tasks to be added to Forge Modules.