Eng Intelligence
Eng Intelligence provides users with key metrics and high-level data to gain insights into services, bottlenecks in the pull request lifecycle, incident response, and more. These metrics can indicate areas that need deeper investigation, allowing you to quickly remediate and improve productivity across your teams.
Eng intelligence reports on metrics for deploys, git (Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab), issue tracking (Jira), and incident management (PagerDuty). See the available metrics under the Metrics header below.
Prerequisites
Before using Eng Intelligence, make sure you have configured your git provider(s) and Jira with the proper permissions. See each integration's documentation page for required permissions and configuration instructions:
Cortex users with the View Eng Intelligence permission can access Eng Intelligence. Users with the Configure Eng Intelligence permission can configure Eng Intelligence settings.
Accessing Eng Intelligence
To view, click Eng Intelligence in the main nav:
If you do not see Eng Intelligence, please contact your Cortex Customer Success Manager.
Using Eng Intelligence
Eng Intelligence aggregates data from your connected entities to calculate critical metrics based on your organization's priorities. The data is presented by team, group, or individual, and can be filtered by time range. Cortex provides a set of default metrics, but you can also create custom metrics to track here.
These values are recalculated every hour. For count metrics, like "PRs opened," you’ll see a "0" if there are no data available. For average metrics, like "Avg PR open to close time," you’ll see "N/A" if no data are available to calculate averages.
Apply time range and team filters
To filter by time range:
In the upper right corner of Eng Intelligence, click the Time range dropdown then select a time range for your metrics display:
To filter by team, group, or owner:
- Click Filter by in the upper right corner.
- Select a team, group, and/or owner.
- Click Save filters.
Group by team hierarchy
By default, each Team entity in Cortex is displayed in its own dedicated row. To group by the team hierarchies you've created, click View as hierarchy.
Group by entity type
Click the Group by dropdown to select and view the metrics for each entity type: team, group, user, service, owner, domain.
Group by user label
After you have set up user labels, you can group by labels in Eng Intelligence.
Click the Group by dropdown and select a label you want to group by. The grouping will be added as a row to the metrics table, along with separate rows for each member of the grouping.
View more details for an entity
To better understand the data behind a trend you see in Eng Intelligence, click an entity to open a side panel with more information. In the panel, see the available metrics a historical performance graph for each.
You can adjust the time range for the graphs to be anywhere between 7 days and 6 months. This will update the graph view and maps to the table, so all metrics will reflect the new timeframe.
Show Scorecard view
The Show Scorecard view overlays Eng Intelligence with Scorecard performance by level when grouped by team or service. This view is not available when grouping by group, user, or owner.
When you select a Scorecard from the Show Scorecard dropdown, the icon representing the level achieved by each entity will appear next to its name.
Metrics
Users with the Configure custom metrics permission can create custom metrics for Eng Intelligence, or you can use the built-in metrics listed below.
Eng intelligence reports on metrics for deploys, git (Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab), Jira, and PagerDuty.
Deploy metrics
Avg deploys/week
Deploy change failure rate
Git metrics
Avg PR open to close time
Avg time to first review
Avg time to approval
PRs opened
Weekly PRs merged
Average PRs reviewed/week
Average commits per PR
Avg LOC changed per PR
Jira metrics
For information on using Jira metrics in Eng Intelligence, see Jira metrics.
PagerDuty metrics
Mean time to resolve incidents
Incidents opened
Incidents opened/week
Eng Intelligence settings
Change Eng Intelligence appearance
From the Eng Intelligence tab of Appearance settings, users with the Configure Eng Intelligence permission can also choose which columns to display and adjust the order of columns.
Set filtering for metric calculation
In the Filters tab on Settings > Eng Intelligence, users with the Configure Eng Intelligence permission can set filters for some pre-defined metrics:
- Under Deploys, select the deploy environments you want to include in the calculation of deploy frequency and deploy failure rate.
- If none are selected, all deploys will be included.
- Under Pull requests, select the authors you want to exclude from the calculation of PR-related metrics.
- If none are selected, PRs from all authors will be included.
- By default, Cortex filters out pull requests opened by bots in GitHub but does not do this automatically for GitLab.
Create and manage user labels for grouping
User labels in Eng Intelligence allow you to group users into cohorts to analyze metrics based on different factors. This can be useful for benchmarking one engineer’s metrics against the average within a cohort, comparing metrics between engineers who use different tools to complete their work, and understanding metrics by different variables: location (e.g., in office or remote), engineer level (staff vs. lead engineer), tech stack (frontend vs. backend), and more.
Users who have the Configure user labels permission can create and apply labels.
The instructions below describe how to use this feature in the Cortex UI. See the Cortex API documentation for instructions on creating and managing user labels programmatically.
Create a user label
- In Cortex, navigate to the Eng Intelligence settings.
- Click your avatar in the lower left then click Settings.
- Under “User management,” click Eng Intelligence.
- Click the Label management tab, then click Create label.
- Fill out the “Create label” form:
- Name: Enter a descriptive name, e.g.,
Location. - Values: Enter possible values for the label, e.g.,
New York,California,Remote. - Description: Optionally enter a description, such as "This label helps us understand metrics by location."
- Name: Enter a descriptive name, e.g.,
- Click Save label.
After saving, the label will appear under the Label management tab in the Eng Intelligence settings page.
View applied user labels
In the Eng Intelligence settings page under the User labeling tab, you can view a list of users and their applied labels. Note that these labels are only displayed in Eng Intelligence, and not in other pages within Cortex.
Assign a user label to a user
- In Cortex, navigate to the Eng Intelligence settings.
- Click your avatar in the lower left then click Settings.
- Under “User management,” click Eng Intelligence.
- Click the User labeling tab.
- Locate the user you want to add a label to. Next to that users name, under the “Labels” column, click the dropdown and select a label.
Assign user labels in bulk
- In Cortex, navigate to the Eng Intelligence settings.
- Click your avatar in the lower left then click Settings.
- Under “User management,” click Eng Intelligence.
- Click the User labeling tab.
- Check the boxes next to the users you want to edit, then in the upper right, click Bulk edit.
- In the bulk edit modal, enter the labels you want to add to the users, then click Confirm changes.
After applying labels to users, you can group by user label while viewing Eng Intelligence metrics.