CircleCI has begun rolling out its Insights service, and chosen to let users expose the data it generates in any platform they see fit, rather than be tied to the CI/CD vendor’s own dashboard.
The vendor said the expansion of its Insights service would make it easier for teams to track the status of jobs and workflows, flagging up areas where pipelines can be sped up, or workflows can be improved.
While the vendor’s previous Insight features were built into its standard dashboard, it expects customers will want to use their own data platforms, said senior product manager Kunal Jain.
“Our thought was, rather than building a UI, we can start with building an API or endpoints, which are pretty much the norm in today’s world where engineers, developers, and QA’s all want to access the data where they are [whether] at their command line, or if they’re using DataDog or some other dashboards.”
This week’s announcement spans four endpoints. Two are more “granular” based around runs from a workflow, or runs on a job. The other two are “aggregated”, which Jain said would give users more of a birds eye view of what’s happening in their development workflow.
”We are providing things like success rate, total runs failed throughput, time to recovery. So those are like the core, your DORA metrics,” he said.
Last year, CircleCI CEO Jim Rose outlined the vendor’s ambitions for Insights, saying it planned to expand the data it served up around individual tasks and jobs, and then scale it up “so that customers can learn from the experience of the crowd, how to make a better, more stable, more efficient software delivery process.”
Jain said while the initial moves provided users with visibility into what’s happening in individual operations, it was looking at “extending that story further to give you some sort of a correlation, based on the different projects that you’re running, or…benchmarking them across different vectors, like say, for language, or user projects”
“I think the hope would be to slowly keep on adding these data points within the current endpoints,” he said. “I think that would be the hope that we can sort of expand the story, add more data to our aggregations, or maybe create another section within the aggregations…chipping away in small chunks.”
Jain added that the new Insights features were available to all its users for free, whether they were paying customers or used its free service.