Eng Intelligence
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 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 providers and Jira with the proper permissions. See each integration's documentation page for required permissions and configuration instructions:
Bitbucket data in Eng Intelligence is in private beta. Please contact your Cortex Customer Success Manager for access.
When using Bitbucket in Eng Intelligence, it is highly recommended to use the workspace token configuration.
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:
Review trends in Eng Intelligence and use that knowledge to inform your Scorecards. While viewing an Eng Intelligence report, in the upper right corner of the page click Create Scorecard. You will be redirected to a configurable Scorecard template that measures performance, activity, and flow metrics that impact productivity.
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 (e.g., PRs opened) , 0 is displayed if no data is available. For average metrics (e.g., average PR open to close time), N/A is displayed if no data is available to calculate averages.
Apply time range and team filters
By default, Eng Intelligence displays data from the last 7 days.
To filter by team, group, or owner:
Click into Group, Owner, or Team, and select filter options.
Click Apply.
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
By default, Eng Intell displays Team data. In the upper left corner, click the Team dropdown to select a different entity type:
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:
Under the Related activity tab, see available metrics and recent activity.
Under the Trends tab, see a historical performance graph for each metric.
In the upper right corner of the panel, you can adjust the time range for the graphs to be anywhere between the last 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
In the upper right corner, click Display. In this drop-down, you can choose whether to display entities in their associated hierarchies and you can select a Scorecard.
When you select a Scorecard, Scorecard performance is overlayed in Eng Intelligence when grouped by team or service. This view is not available when grouping by group, user, or owner. The icon representing the Scorecard level achieved by each entity will appear next to the entity 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
Git metrics
Jira metrics
For information on using Jira metrics in Eng Intelligence, see Jira metrics.
PagerDuty metrics
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
Under Settings > Eng Intelligence, in the Filters tab, 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 User labeling settings.
Click your avatar in the lower left then click Settings.
Under Eng Intelligence, click User labeling.
In the upper right corner, click Create label.
Fill out the “Create label” form:
Name: Enter a descriptive name, e.g.,
Location.Description: Optionally enter a description, such as "This label helps us understand metrics by location."
Values: Enter possible values for the label, e.g.,
New York,California,Remote.
Click Create 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 User labeling settings.
In the list, locate the user you want to add a label to. Under the "Labels" column for that user, click the pencil icon.
In the side panel, click into the dropdown to select a pre-existing label. To create a new label, type in a name then click +Create in the dropdown.
At the bottom of the side panel, click Set labels.
Assign user labels in bulk
In Cortex, navigate to the User labeling settings.
In the bulk edit modal, enter the labels you want to add to the users, then click Set labels.
After applying labels to users, you can group by user label while viewing Eng Intelligence metrics.
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