DEVOPSdigest

The new Octopus Deploy Q3 2022 Release includes two product enhancements to help enterprise teams improve DevOps outcomes – a ServiceNow Change Management integration and early access to its DevOps Insights for DORA metrics.

The new capabilities help enterprise DevOps teams deploy software more effectively by eliminating error-prone manual processes associated with software change management and providing insights into DevOps performance based on the four DORA metrics.

"Deployment automation provides the collaboration and process environment at the intersection where 'Dev' and 'Ops' teams connect and work," said Paul Stovell, CEO and co-founder of Octopus Deploy. "Change Management automation via our ServiceNow integration and DORA metrics insights will help our customers speed feedback loops and streamline change management along with better visibility into the overall health of DevOps initiatives."

Based on its work with more than 350,000 IT professionals, Octopus Deploy has seen firsthand how the success of DevOps aligns with great deployment automation practices. The ServiceNow Change Management integration helps customers meet audit and compliance requirements and improve DevOps team productivity, while DevOps Insights provides built-in reporting based on the four key DORA metrics.

Managing deployment pipelines at scale is complex for DevOps teams, and complexity increases with change management. Manually filling out change requests is time-consuming and error-prone. With the ServiceNow integration, Octopus Deploy users can automatically create pre-populated, normal change requests with out-of-the-box traceability to ensure CI/CD and release management processes comply with company policies and regulations. A win-win for DevOps teams and auditors alike.

Benefits of the Octopus Deploy ServiceNow integration include::

- More productive teams – Octopus Deploy automatically creates change requests and associates them with deployments, so the right stakeholders are instantly known to ensure changes are compliant and approved. Octopus also prevents deployments from executing until all approvals are complete.

- More compliant DevOps – DevOps teams gain confidence that unapproved changes are never deployed to production. This makes audits smooth and validates that all processes adhere to system reports.

Octopus DevOps Insights provides visibility into DevOps performance by surfacing insights based on the four key DORA metrics, so enterprise teams can gauge results and make informed decisions on where to improve.

The recent release provides DevOps Insights at two levels. All customers can access reports at a project level to uncover rich insights based on deployment history.

For enterprise customers, there are additional aggregated insights that offer the following benefits:

- Aggregate data across your space so you can compare metrics across projects to identify what's working and what isn't

- Inform better decision making: identify problems, track improvements, and celebrate successes

- Quantify DevOps performance based on data

Leslie Brody, Principal Site Reliability Engineer at IMO, was part of the Alpha program for Octopus DevOps Insights. "We participated in the DevOps Insights Alpha program and found it really useful," said Brody. "The insights give our teams easily accessible, concrete data to help validate our assumptions and make decisions. They provide proof-points to share with decision-makers and allow managers to find the information they need at a glance."

These features are just some of the improvements in the Octopus Deploy Q3 2022 release, including additional support for Configuration as Code variables for version-controlled projects, and a Jira Service Management integration in early access.