How Capital One’s Open‑Source Hygieia Dashboard Enhances DevOps Transparency

In the previous article I discussed Capital One’s DevOps transformation and its shift from a "Closed Source First" to an "Open Source First" mindset, emphasizing open‑source contributions as a business advantage.

Now we examine Capital One’s open‑source DevOps dashboard tool, Hygieia .

1. Value of a DevOps Dashboard

Before describing specific functions, it is useful to understand why a dashboard matters. The DevOps Handbook outlines a three‑step method:

Step 1 – Accelerate value flow from left to right : Automate the end‑to‑end software delivery pipeline (requirements, coding, build, test, integration, deployment, release) to increase delivery speed.

Step 2 – Establish rapid, continuous feedback from right to left : A feedback loop reveals problems early in the lifecycle, makes the process transparent, highlights bottlenecks and enables targeted fixes.

Step 3 – Continuous learning and experimentation : Build safer work systems, turn local findings into global improvements, and foster organizational learning.

Hygieia focuses on the second step, providing visual, real‑time feedback on the health of the continuous delivery pipeline.

Capital One tried many commercial and open‑source dashboard tools but found none that displayed the full health of the pipeline—from code commit to production deployment and quality metrics—so they built and open‑sourced Hygieia.

2. Main Functions of the Dashboard

Successful continuous delivery requires fast feedback for everyone involved—product owners, developers, testers, operations, security engineers, release engineers, and managers. Transparency at each pipeline stage is especially critical in large organizations with multiple agile teams.

Using Hygieia, each engineer and manager can see:

Team user stories and their completion status.

Code commits, commit frequency, and commit authors.

Build status, failures, and failure reasons.

Static analysis results, security scan results, unit‑test outcomes, test coverage, functional and non‑functional test results.

Environment details and deployment status of code in each environment.

Which software version is deployed where, and which deployments failed.

Code movement across development, test, and integration environments.

Queue length for each stage, highlighting waiting times between stages.

Hygieia presents a complete view from user story to production deployment, showing just enough information for teams to take corrective action.

The dashboard also displays quality metrics, helping product owners decide whether to add quality‑improvement work to the next sprint and prompting discussions about pipeline design (e.g., test execution time, flow speed).

Early adoption at Capital One revealed low unit‑test coverage and many severe code issues; teams responded by adding improvement work to regular sprints, supported by management.

3. Main Views

Hygieia offers four primary views:

Composite View : Shows detailed product information, current sprint features, code commits, CI activity, code and security analysis, unit‑test and functional‑test results, deployments, and environment status.

Pipeline View : Visualizes the lifecycle of each component from development through testing to deployment.

Product View : Displays the end‑to‑end lifecycle for each configured product.

Cloud Environment View : Shows application instances, resource utilization, and related metrics.

Key screenshots illustrate these views:

4. Technical Details

Architecture diagram:

Hygieia can integrate with a wide range of tools, including:

Requirement Management : Jira, VersionOne, GitLab

Configuration Management : Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, Subversion

Build Management : Bamboo, Jenkins, Jenkins‑codequality, Cucumber, Sonar

Deployment Management : uDeploy, XLDeploy

Environment Management : AWS

Performance Management : AppDynamics

CMDB : HP Service Manager (HPSM)

Library Policy : Nexus IQ

Artifact Repository : Artifactory

ChatOps : HipChat

5. Summary

Management guru Peter Drucker said, "If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it."

DevOps is not a one‑time implementation nor a simple automation project; the key is obtaining effective feedback throughout the entire delivery lifecycle, continuously improving transparency, and acting on measured results.

Continuous learning and practice keep DevOps moving forward.

6. Hygieia Resources

Project repository: https://github.com/capitalone/Hygieia

Documentation: http://www.capitalone.io/Hygieia

Additional article: https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/03/hygieia