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Cover image for Stop Building Spreadsheets: Your CI/CD Tools Should Talk to Each Other
David Bernard
David Bernard

Posted on • Edited on

Stop Building Spreadsheets: Your CI/CD Tools Should Talk to Each Other

#devops #cicd #dorametrics #observability

You have an impressive CI/CD stack: GitHub, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Datadog, PagerDuty. But when leadership asks "How fast do we deploy?" you're opening 6
browser tabs and building spreadsheets.

The Current Reality

current cicd stack

Before CDviz: You manually correlate data from scattered tools

Each tool has its own data, but few tools communicate with each other. You become the integration layer.

What CDviz Actually Provides Today

Event Collection: Collects events (CDEvents, native HTTP events, or states) and produces standardized CDEvents from your existing tools
Storage: PostgreSQL database with TimescaleDB extension for time-series CDEvent storage
Visualization: Pre-built Grafana dashboards for deployment tracking and execution metrics

cdviz and the cicd stack

Current Dashboards

description of the artifact timeline panel

  • Service and artifact deployment timeline across stages (registry, environments, etc.)
  • CDEvents activity feed with real-time updates
  • Duration metrics for tasks, pipelines, and tests
  • Queries to annotate runtime metrics with version information

What's Not Included (Yet)

  • DORA metrics calculations (you build the SQL queries)
  • Automated incident correlation (data is available, custom queries required)
  • Multi-team comparisons (possible but requires additional configuration)

5-Minute Demo: See the Difference 

# Start CDviz locally
git clone https://github.com/cdviz-dev/cdviz.git
cd cdviz/demos/stack-compose
docker compose up

# Send a deployment event
curl -i -X POST http://localhost:8080/webhook/000-cdevents \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "context": {
      "version": "0.4.1",
      "id": "0",
      "source": "demo",
      "type": "dev.cdevents.service.deployed.0.2.0",
      "timestamp": "'$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)'"
    },
    "subject": {
      "id": "my-namespace/my-service/my-container",
      "type": "service",
      "content": {
        "environment": {
          "id": "my-group/my-region"
        },
        "artifactId": "pkg:oci/my-service@v1.2.3"
      }
    }
  }'

# View dashboard
open localhost:3000/d/demo_service_deployed/service3a-demo
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Result: Event appears immediately in timeline. No manual correlation needed.

sample data with annotation

Some events are generated automatically by the demo. Browse the other dashboard to see some possibilities.

The Value: Time and Accuracy

Before CDviz:

  • Query GitHub: 5 minutes
  • Check Jenkins: 3 minutes
  • Correlate timestamps: 10 minutes
  • Build report: 15 minutes
  • Total: 33 minutes per request

After CDviz integration:

  • Open dashboard: 1 minute
  • Total: 1 minute

Real Questions CDviz Helps Answer

✅ "What version is running in production right now?"
✅ "When did we last deploy service X?"
✅ "Show me all deployments from last week"
✅ "What's our deployment frequency?"

🔄 "How do teams compare?" (data available, dashboard TBD)
❌ "What's our lead time?" (needs commit events integration)

Next Steps

You can look at CDviz's documentation until the coming articles about how to instrument and generate CDEvents, how to improve communication between tools via CDEvents + CDviz.

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