Eng Intelligence
Spot problems early and drive action in Cortex
Eng Intelligence provides you 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 give context to cross-team activities and indicate areas that need deeper investigation, allowing you to quickly remediate and improve productivity across your teams.
Eng intelligence features include:
DORA Dashboard: Get clear insights into how fast, reliable, and efficient your development practices are.
Velocity Dashboard: Visualize your team's success across the software development lifecycle.
Metrics Explorer: Analyze trends over time and drill into the underlying data for investigation. Explore metrics for deploys, version control, project management (Jira), and incident management (PagerDuty).
Custom metrics: The ability to define your own custom time series metrics to power the analytics in Eng Intelligence, drawing from your integrations with Cortex or your organization's internal data. Currently custom metrics are only available in the All Metrics (Classic View) but planned to be added to the new experiences.
Measuring success with Eng Intelligence in Cortex
In practice, success means that teams are not only tracking metrics like cycle time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR), but they are also taking action to make progress based on how the metrics are trending. The focus should be less about hitting specific benchmarks and more about creating continuous feedback loops that drive consistent improvement.
Eng Intelligence goals
Eng Intelligence metrics provide clear, actionable insights into how your teams work, allowing you to find opportunities to improve delivery speed, reliability, and quality.
Before setting goals, we recommend establishing a baseline on your top-priority metrics.
Early signs of improvement
Leading indicators show that teams are learning from Eng Intelligence metrics and effectively making changes in their day-to-day work. For example:
Faster feedback loops: Time to first PR review, Time to PR approval, and Work item lead time steadily decrease over a given period.
Smaller, more frequent PRs: PR size trends downward while merged PR count increases.
Balanced workloads: More unique PR authors over time, showing distributed contribution. For project management metrics, a balance of Work items created and Work items completed shows healthy workload management.
Proactive incident management: Change failure rates decrease as deploy insights are integrated.
Outcomes of improvement
Lagging indicators can measure whether your organization is seeing tangible improvements in delivery and reliability. For example:
Cycle time improves from baseline.
Deployment frequency increases without increased failure rates.
MTTR decreases after incidents.
Higher engineering satisfaction is reported in internal surveys as bottlenecks are resolved.
The backlog of work items created stabilizes or decreases while work items are steadily being completed, indicating the team is successfully matching capacity to demand.
Best practices for reviewing Eng Intelligence metric trends
To make your data more meaningful, we recommend the following best practices:
Segment by teams and services to avoid skewed organization-wide averages.
Look for trends rather than snapshots. Success is measured over time; a short-term fluctuation can be misleading.
When you identify process gaps with Eng Intelligence, take action to drive adoption of standards: Use Scorecards or Initiatives to encourage your teams to get their owned services aligned with standards. Use Workflows to streamline repeatable tasks for engineers so they can focus on other work.
Defining success
The following are common ways to confirm successful use of Eng Intelligence features:
Leadership uses the dashboards to make strategic decisions (e.g., during planning cycles).
Teams are actively using the dashboards to spot bottlenecks.
Metrics drive measurable changes in process, tooling, and culture.
Improvements are sustained and repeatable, not just short-term spikes.
Accessing Eng Intelligence
To get started, click Eng Intelligence from the main nav in Cortex.
See the docs for more information on each part of Eng Intelligence:
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