Value streams dashboard

The “Value streams dashboard” shows the overview counters of a group or a project, its lifecycle and DORA metrics for the last six months by month and, for a group, how its projects score on the DORA metrics. The dashboard of a group covers the group, its subgroups and all their projects. A personal project, one in the namespace of a user, has no dashboard.

The dashboard takes no period and no filters: the tables cover the five past calendar months and the current month, and the counters show the latest snapshot.

Report availability

The dashboard of a group is available to members of the group with the “Reporter” role and above, and to users of the “Auditor” type. Members with the “Guest” or “Planner” role do not see the “Value streams dashboard” item in the group menu, and the direct address answers with 404. The visibility level of the group does not extend this access: with the “Public” or “Internal” level, a user who is not a member of the group does not see the dashboard.

The dashboard of a project is available to members of the project with the “Guest” role and above, including those who hold that role in a parent group, and to users of the “Auditor” type. In a project with the “Public” visibility level, the dashboard is open to any visitor, including one who has not signed in. With the “Internal” visibility level, the dashboard is open to any signed-in user. In a project where the “Analytics” feature is disabled, or issues and merge requests are both disabled, the menu item is absent and the direct address answers with 404. A personal project has neither the menu item nor the page.

The DORA panels need a permission of their own: the “DORA metrics for ” table and, on the group page, the “DORA performers score for ” chart and the “Projects by DORA metric in ” table. Members with the “Reporter” role and above hold it in the group and in the project; users of the “Auditor” type hold it in the group only. Without it the panels stay on the page and show “You have insufficient permissions to view this panel.” in place of their content. A member with the “Guest” role, a visitor of a public project and a user of the “Auditor” type on a project page see the DORA panels this way.

Viewing the report

To view the dashboard of a group:

1. In the top bar, select “Search or go to…” and pick the group.
2. In the group menu, go to “Analyze” → “Value streams dashboard”.

To view the dashboard of a project:

1. In the top bar, select “Search or go to…” and pick the project.
2. In the project menu, go to “Analyze” → “Value streams dashboard”.

The dashboard is also available at a direct address:

Panels

The group page holds, from top to bottom:

• the “ overview” card;
• the counters “Groups”, “Projects”, “Users”, “Issues”, “Merge requests” and “Pipelines”;
• the “Lifecycle metrics for ” table;
• the “DORA metrics for ” table;
• the “DORA performers score for ” chart;
• the “Projects by DORA metric in ” table.

The project page holds the “ overview” card, the counters “Issues”, “Merge requests” and “Pipelines”, and the “Lifecycle metrics for ” and “DORA metrics for ” tables. <NAMESPACE> in a panel title is the name of the group or the project.

A panel whose data failed to load shows “Something went wrong.” and offers “Retry”.

Overview card and counters

The “ overview” card shows the avatar, the full name with a link to the group or the project, the type (“Group” or “Project”) and the visibility level (“Public”, “Internal” or “Private”).

The counters are snapshots taken in the background once a month, in the last three days of the month, for the hierarchies whose top-level group turned the counting on (see Enabling the overview counting). A counter reads the newest snapshot taken within the last year and shows “Last counted ” under the value. The snapshot covers every group and project of the hierarchy, so the dashboard of a subgroup reads the part of the snapshot that belongs to the subgroup.

On the group page the counters are:

• “Groups” — the subgroups of the group at all levels;
• “Projects” — the projects of the group and of its subgroups;
• “Users” — the direct members of the group itself; members of subgroups, pending invitations and access requests are not counted;
• “Issues”, “Merge requests” and “Pipelines” — across the projects of the group and of its subgroups; a merge request is counted in its target project.

On the project page, “Issues”, “Merge requests” and “Pipelines” count the project itself.

While the top-level group has not turned the counting on, the counters show 0, and a warning at the top of the page reads “The overview counts of groups, projects, users, issues, merge requests and pipelines are not collected for this hierarchy, so those panels show zero.” A user who can open the settings of the top-level group sees it followed by “Turn on the background counting in the analytics settings of the top-level group.”, where “analytics settings” links to the page; anyone else sees “An owner of the top-level group can turn on the background counting in its analytics settings.” Each counter panel also shows the warning “This count is taken in the background once a month, and the top-level group has not turned that on.”

Once the counting is turned on, the warning at the top is gone; until the first snapshot, the counters show 0 and each counter panel shows the warning “No snapshot of this count has been taken yet. The background counting runs once a month.” Once the counting is turned off, the counters show 0 again with the first warning, whichever snapshots were taken.

Enabling the overview counting

The counting is turned on in the settings of a top-level group by a member with the “Owner” role. A subgroup has no such page: the “Analytics” item is absent from its “Settings” menu, and the direct address answers with 404.

To turn the counting on:

1. In the top bar, select “Search or go to…” and pick the top-level group.
2. In the group menu, go to “Settings” → “Analytics”.
3. In the “Value streams dashboard” section, select “Enable overview background aggregation”. The section reads “The overview counts of the dashboard are taken in the background once a month for the whole group hierarchy.”, and the checkbox “Without it the overview panels show no counts.”
4. Select “Save changes”. The page reports “Analytics settings were successfully updated.”

The page is also available at https://<HOST>/groups/<GROUP>/-/settings/analytics.

The snapshot of a hierarchy is taken in the last three days of the month, once per month; a hierarchy that turns the counting on earlier in the month gets its first snapshot in those days. The job runs hourly, and a hierarchy too large for one run is continued on the next.

To turn the counting off, clear “Enable overview background aggregation” and select “Save changes”.

Lifecycle metrics table

The “Lifecycle metrics for ” table has the “Metric” column, six month columns headed by the month and the year, the “Change (%)” column and the “Trend” column:

• the month columns are the five past calendar months, oldest first, and the current month to today; the months are cut in the time zone of the browser;
• “Change (%)” is the change of the last full month against the first column, the month five months back; the current month is not compared. The badge is green when the change improves the row and red otherwise: for a count, a rise; for a duration, a fall. It reads “n/a” when one of the two months has no value or the earlier month is zero;
• “Trend” is a line over the five past months, without the current month.

Every cell is computed when the page opens. A cell without a value reads “-”. Durations are in days. The icon next to a row name opens the description of the row. A row whose data failed to load is named in the panel’s warning “Some metric comparisons failed to load: ”, with “Retry”.

The rows:

Each row name links to the report that details it:

• “Lead time” and “Cycle time” — Value stream analytics;
• “Issues created” and “Issues closed” — Issue analytics;
• “Deploys”, “Median time to merge” and “Merge request throughput” — on the group page Productivity analytics, on the project page Merge request analytics.

DORA metrics table

The “DORA metrics for ” table has the same columns as the lifecycle table. Its rows are computed over the production environments of the project or, on the group page, of all projects of the group and its subgroups, from the daily values described in Recording of DORA metrics:

• “Deployment frequency” — successful deployments per day: the deployments of the month divided by its calendar days, for the current month by the days to today;
• “Lead time for changes” — the median time, in days, from the merge of a merge request to the end of the deployment that delivered it; the median is taken over the daily medians of the month;
• “Time to restore service” — the median time, in days, from the creation of an incident to its closing; the median is taken over the daily medians of the month;
• “Change failure rate” — incidents created in the month per deployment of the month, in percent; a month without deployments reads “-”.

The badge of “Change (%)” is green for a rise of “Deployment frequency” and for a fall of the other three rows. The row names of this table are not links.

DORA performers score

The “DORA performers score for ” chart is on the group page only. It scores each project of the group and its subgroups that you can see, for the last full calendar month, on each DORA metric, and shows one column per metric: the “High”, “Medium” and “Low” segments count the projects with that score, the “No data” segment counts the scored projects without a value for the metric. The axes read “DORA metric” and “Projects”. The caption reads “Scored projects for the last full month; of them have no DORA data.”, where <M> is the projects with no recorded DORA day in that month; these projects are in no column. Pointing at a column shows the thresholds of its metric.

A project is scored for a month once an event on one of its production environments is recorded on a day of that month. The score of each metric:

Between the two thresholds the score is “Medium”. When no project of the group is scored for the month, every column counts all projects under “No data”, and the chart adds “No project was scored for: .”

Projects by DORA metric

The “Projects by DORA metric in ” table is on the group page only. It lists the projects of the group and its subgroups that you can see and that have a recorded DORA day in the last two full months: the “Project” column with the avatar and the name linking to the project, then a column per DORA metric with the value of the last full month and a badge with its change against the month before. The caption reads “Showing of projects; have no DORA data for the last two months.”

The table opens sorted by “Project”; select a column header to sort by it. Projects without a value in the column are listed last, whichever direction is selected.

Recording of DORA metrics

The four metrics, their daily charts and their REST API are described on the DORA metrics page.

DORA values are recorded per environment and per day, at the moment an event happens:

• a successful deployment is counted on the day it finished; the lead time for changes is measured from the merge of each merge request linked to the deployment to the end of the deployment, once the merge requests are linked, five minutes after the deployment;
• an incident created, closed or reopened is recorded on the oldest production environment of the project: the incident on the day it was created, its time to restore on the day it was closed; an incident marked as a duplicate is left out;
• an issue changed to or from the “Incident” type, or marked as a duplicate or unmarked, is recounted on the day of its creation and, when it is closed, on the day of its closing.

The day of an event is taken in the time zone of the server. The dashboard reads production environments only, so a deployment to an environment of another tier does not count.

Nothing is recorded for the time before the update to the version with the dashboard, and no history is reconstructed afterwards. Deleting an environment removes its recorded days; deleting the oldest production environment of a project removes the incident history of the project with it.