How do we avoid turning this into developer surveillance?

Aggregate by team/service and time window (e.g., weekly). No individual leaderboards, no keystrokes, no IDE plugins. Publish definitions and use the data to improve platforms, not performance-review individuals.

Do we need a data lake or a new SaaS to start?

No. Use Git provider APIs, CI/ArgoCD Prometheus exporters, and your existing warehouse (BigQuery/Postgres). One transform layer (dbt/SQL), Grafana for visuals. You can always layer a vendor later if you outgrow this.

Where do DORA metrics fit?

Delivery frequency and MTTR are straight DORA. Lead time is your cycle time model (first commit to prod). Change failure rate can be derived from deployment failures and incident tags. Keep definitions explicit and versioned.

How do we handle monorepos and multi-team ownership?

Tag by directory or service label with CODEOWNERS and CI labels. In transforms, map paths to teams and services. Provide a team filter on the dashboard so ownership lines are clear without bespoke tracking.

What’s the maintenance cost?

Under a day per month if you keep to paved-road tooling. New repo? It’s just more Git events. New service? It’s just more Prom metrics. The expensive part is the fixes the dashboard reveals—worth it.

Platform-productivity · Oct 4, 2025 · 9 minute read

DX Dashboards Developers Trust: Paved‑Road Metrics Without the Surveillance Creep

Stop guessing. Ship a dashboard that shows where your developers actually lose time—using the tools you already run (Git provider, CI, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Grafana). No bespoke data lake, no creepy tracking.

Alex Mercer

Principal Consultant, GitPlumbers

20 years building and rescuing platforms from the dot-com rubble to today’s AI-fueled pipelines. Former SRE lead at a unicorn you’ve definitely deployed, recovering Jenkins whisperer, and fan of paved roads over artisanal snowflakes.

If your DX dashboard requires a PhD to explain, it's a vanity mirror, not an instrument panel.

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DX Dashboards Developers Trust: Paved‑Road Metrics Without the Surveillance Creep

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist