Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Azure DevOps has become a cornerstone for development teams, providing comprehensive tools for managing, planning, and delivering software projects. But effective project management isn’t just about setting up pipelines and managing repositories – it’s about measuring progress and making data-driven decisions. Here’s a look at three powerful tools for reporting Azure DevOps metrics: Azure DevOps built-in dashboards, Power BI, and SquaredUp.

Azure DevOps is a powerful toolset that helps teams plan, develop, deliver, and operate software projects efficiently. Among its many features, Dashboards and Boards stand out as critical tools for project management and team collaboration. While they may seem similar at first glance, they serve different purposes and cater to different needs within the DevOps lifecycle. This blog will explore the differences between Dashboards and Boards in Azure DevOps, highlighting when and how to use each effectively.

Recently I've been working with an MSP on a couple of their use cases. One of the services they're designing for their customers is that of cost optimization on their IT infrastructure. On top of the in-house services and tools they had, they needed a tool to help them identify and quantify this underutilization. This is something SquaredUp is very well suited to do – and so we got to work!

As a DevOps engineer maintaining deployment pipelines in Azure DevOps, it's crucial to monitor several aspects to ensure the pipelines are efficient, reliable, and secure. Here are 10 key metrics you should focus on.

With the release of the Data Explorer, users can now dig into the data behind any tile and slice, dice and explore as needed. This is perfect for those ad-hoc ‘scratchpad’ style scenarios where you want to get some answers without creating yet another dashboard. A couple of weeks ago, we released an awesome new feature that we haven’t had a chance to showcase yet. It’s called The Data Explorer, and I think it’s pretty cool. Let’s dive in!

In this blog, I’d like to announce a new feature that brings an extra touch of personalization to your SquaredUp experience: Workspace Icons.

Using SquaredUp, you can query Azure Resource Graph with KQL to pull Change history, Azure Service Health and maintenance schedules. For the uninitiated, Azure Resource Graph is a series of tables holding information on Azure resources and how they are related. Its data is used many places within Azure itself (such as the Azure Portal’s native search) and it’s data can help us with many use cases as it is designed to help with queries at scale.