An age-old problem in DevOps is how to establish measurable DevOps ROI.

DevOps solution provider, Puppet, has released its new product, Insights, which provides data and analysis from DevOps processes that can be used to help companies understand the business value of DevOps.

Measuring things such as sales pipeline velocity, win rates, and deal size are tried and tested methods business leaders use to tell them what’s going on in their sales cycle.

Tools, such as Salesforce, make this kind of measurement easy, and the visual representations and reports that can be produced are used as the basis for formulating financial projections and business plans. The same cannot be said for DevOps, however.

Unlike traditional business measurements, DevOps has not had any reliable way to measure success or identify areas for improvement.

While DevOps is all about shortening software development lifecycles and helping teams deliver new features, fixes, and updates in time to support wider business objectives, measuring this holistically is difficult.

There’s no doubt that DevOps ROI is highly valued because organisations continue to invest in it, but that’s not enough.

It’s important for DevOps to be accurately measured, not only so improvements can be implemented, but because once true business value is known, a better case can be made for more budget or resources, if these are needed.

Without an accurate way to measure what their DevOps teams do, technology leaders have been, to some extent, in the dark about software delivery processes and how to identify and troubleshoot problem areas.

They can’t ask “how fast are we moving?” or “why does that process take so long”, “what’s the quality of the software we develop?” or “where can improvements be made?”

Mark Trumpbour, VP of DevOps, ServiceChannel, agrees: “A comprehensive view of how we deliver software, as an entire organisation, is critical to the success of our business. Having full visibility of the value we deliver through software, and the insights needed to know what to optimise next will give us the speed we need to delight our customers and lead our industry.”

Now Puppet says it has an answer to this lack of visibility. Its recently launched Puppet Insights solution is designed to enable DevOps processes and performance to be measured just like other areas of a business, something that’s never been done before.

For the first time, says Puppet, DevOps metrics can be recorded, aggregated, measured and analysed before being presented as detailed reports, or on a dashboard, giving team leaders a bird’s eye view across the whole toolchain.

Based on these insights, leaders should be able to optimise software delivery across their entire organisation and focus on how to improve the velocity, quality, and the impact of their software development delivery cycles.

Teams can even import and correlate data from across the toolchain and pull best practices data from thousands of customers to help benchmark success.

Alex Bilmes, senior director of product at Puppet, says: “Puppet Insights helps measure the impact of DevOps investments so that success can be benchmarked and the true value of DevOps demonstrated.”