Changelog

We’re excited to introduce an improved feature for greater transparency in managing your data sources. With this update you get

1. Better visibility into Source Status. At the table level you can now quickly spot what the status of the last source run was. This makes it much easier to spot failures.
2. Easier debugging for issues with data ingestion.You now have access to the log history of your data sources. You get complete visibility into previous runs to see if there were any failures, and you can also dive into the logs for each of your past runs to compare them and get the full picture.
3. Deeper understanding of what changed. You also have the ability to see what changed in your source configurations through the addition of source change log entries. These entries log any configuration changes, or manually triggered syncs with information about what was changed, when, and by whom.

Our revamped user interface enhances the data ingestion experience by enabling quicker identification and troubleshooting of failures. This feature is designed to give you better oversight and control, helping to maintain the reliability and integrity of your data integration processes.

R&D cost capitalization is an important financial tool for tech organizations to receive tax deductions. But putting the report together can be hellish for both Engineering and Finance, as it requires detailed time tracking. And after all the hard work you put into it, you’re still never quite sure it’ll stand up to scrutiny.

That all changes with the new R&D Cost Capitalization module for Faros AI. Gone are the spreadsheets and frantic nights fretting over this task. Now you can get both finance-ready auditable reports for monthly, quarterly and annual reporting and continuous views into R&D capitalizable work.

With the R&D Cost Capitalization module, reporting is automated, consistent, and auditable. Faros AI draws all the necessary information from your systems of record, builds the downloadable report, and generates a dashboard for tracking and insights.

Getting started is easy. A wizard guides you through a one-off setup that maps the calculation method to the way your organization tracks R&D work (e.g., by initiative or epic) and translates effort to time (e.g. by story points, time in-progress or other).

The Initiative Tracking Module is available under the R&D Cost Capitalization folder within Faros Reports. It is a premium add-on in the Faros platform; please contact Faros for more information.

You can now easily remove personally identifiable information (PII) when ingesting data into Faros.

Our new PII Scanner / Stripper scans the requested fields of any data source and redacts them out or replaces them with values of your choice. Built in support is provided for common PII such as names, phone numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, social security numbers and more. You can also extend it to custom redaction patterns.

The PII Scanner / Stripper is available as part of our Enterprise Bundle. Contact us for more details.

Faros scorecards allow you to see how you're performing on key metrics across your entire organization. Now, with query-defined metrics they can be even more customized to your needs.

With query-defined metrics, you can create a custom chart in Faros that let's you define any metric you want to track as well as what success looks like for each team. This custom metric can then be easily added into your scorecard, letting you understand how all teams are stacking up.

For example, you could create a chart that computes how satisfied your employees are based on survey data. You're also able to control which scores are considered high, medium and low. Once you've created the chart simply add it to your scorecard and you'll start seeing the full picture of employee satisfaction at your company.

Faros customers can now use webhooks to integrate their Jira data into Faros. With webhooks, organizations have much more control over the what, when, and how of their Jira data ingestion.

With webhooks:

• Data is pushed into Faros in real-time
• Users have more fine-grained control of what data is sent to Faros
• There is less load on the source system
• There is less overhead to manage

For more details on how to configure and use Jira webhook, see our docs.

Guided Exploration is designed to make your data analysis experience even easier, especially if you're new to Faros. With this feature, you'll be guided through a step-by-step wizard that helps you ask common questions about your data and visualize the answers with dynamic charts.

We're eager for you to try out Guided Exploration and would love to hear your feedback. Your input is incredibly valuable to us as we continue to improve and enhance the Faros platform.

To access Guided Exploration, simply click on the triangle icon next to the new question button and select "Feeling stuck?"

Top of mind for every engineering leader and technical program manager are questions like:

• What are people currently working on?
• How are strategic cross-org initiatives progressing?
• What’s going well?
• Where are the issues?

The Initiative Tracking module answers those questions and then some. It’s where you come to make sure engineering is appropriately staffed and working on the right things and your most high-priority projects. You can keep critical work on track and understand what is running behind, and you can utilize this visibility to make better decisions with your partners in Product and Finance.

Visibility into all your initiatives, sliced and diced the way you want to look at it, will help you make faster and sounder decisions based on progress to goal, estimated remaining time, completed and outstanding work, and who’s working on what.

The Initiative Tracking Module is available under the Initiative Tracking folder within Faros Reports. It is a premium add-on in the Faros platform; please contact Faros for more information.

The Developer Experience module centralizes developer satisfaction survey data in one place and intersects the sentiment data from employee responses with telemetry-based data from your engineering operations. This novel blended visibility into the complete developer experience provides actionable insights that allow you to take corrective measures faster and observe their impact on engagement, retention, and operational excellence over time.

The DevEx Module is available under the Developer Experience folder within Faros Reports. It is a premium add-on in the Faros platform; please contact Faros for more information.

Ever found yourself curious about who's really diving into Faros on your team? Wondering if that meticulously crafted dashboard is getting the attention it deserves? Or who is looking at their TeamCentral page?

Introducing Faros Usage Metrics, Now at Your Fingertips!

With our latest update, we've brought the power of Faros metrics directly into the heart of Faros itself.

📈 Calculate WAU & MAU with Ease: Get real insights into the engagement of your internal Faros users. No more guesswork—know exactly who's on board weekly and monthly.

⏰ Track Dashboard Usage Over Time: Watch your dashboard adoption evolve! Dive into the analytics of your dashboards to see who is viewing it and how frequently.

🌟 Discover Popular Dashboards and Pages: Ever wondered which dashboards and pages are stealing the spotlight? Now, it's crystal clear. Pinpoint the favorites and tailor your data strategy accordingly.

👥 Track Faros Adoption by Team: Understand how different teams are embracing Faros and tailor your support and resources accordingly.

🎨 Craft Your Own Adoption Charts: Personalize your adoption charts to align with your unique needs and showcase insights that matter most to you.

Dive into Faros Metrics today by checking out the new dashboard, found in your Faros Reports collection!

We're thrilled to introduce a significant upgrade to our in-app navigation, designed to provide users with a more intuitive and efficient experience.

Key Highlights:

1. Customizable Roles: Take charge of your application's access control like never before. Define the permissions and access levels for each user role, ensuring that individuals see and interact only with what matters most to their responsibilities.
2. Precision Navigation: With customizable roles, not only can you control what features users can access, but you can also curate their navigation menu. Streamline the user interface by displaying only the relevant options, reducing clutter, and improving overall user efficiency.

Lighthouse AI is a new Faros tool that leverages large language models to make all of your existing charts easier to use and also helps you create new ones.

Chart Explainer

Lighthouse AI's Chart Explainer is very well named; it explains every chart in natural language, whether it’s been custom-built or came out of the box. Simply click the Lighthouse icon for a clear explanation that helps you understand what the chart is measuring. These explanations allow you to understand what your data is telling you and act more confidently.

Query Helper

For those who are building their own charts, one of the challenges is getting started. Now you can use a GenAI prompt to ask Faros a business question, and Faros will suggest charts and tables that hold the answer, provide key information about the data, and supply tips and tricks on how to build your query.

Faros AI is thrilled to announce Scorecards, a built-in feature that enables engineering organizations to define best practices for their organization and measure its adoption across all their teams. Scorecards' powerful visualization gives companies both a birds-eye view of the entire organization's team health as well as details on each individual team, all in one interactive view. Measurements for the scorecard can be custom-created and incorporate data from productivity, quality, security, cost, and more.

For more details on corecards, see our docs.

The new Release to Deployment Transform feature offers another way to get deployment data into Faros without changing your processes. You can now transform your release data into deployment data directly in Faros. This is great for any team that uses releases to represent code deployments.

With the new transform UI you can specify which subset of your releases represent deployments, what application is getting deployed and which environment you're deploying to.

This is yet another way to get your deployment data into Faros. Alternative methods include instrumenting your pipelines or connecting to a source system like Buildkite.

Reach out to [email protected] to figure out which method is right for your teams.

We have made improvements to time durations calculation and associated visualizations to provide more accurate insights. Previously, time durations were computed as the (maxDate - minDate) for data within a specified range, which could lead to incomplete results when data was sparse or events clustered in the middle of the range. The entire time range of data being now leveraged, you may see a decrease in the value of certain metrics, but they will be a more accurate reflection of performance.This change applies to calculations for Weekly Deployment Frequency in the DevOps Management module and for Monthly Pull Request Merge Rate in the Engineering Productivity Module. Gauge charts in module dashboards, and scorecard calculations have been adjusted accordingly.

We have also extended the default duration filter for the DevOps and Engineering Productivity modules from 30 days to 90 days to access a longer history of data for better trend analysis and performance optimization. This change applies to dashboards and related metrics in the Scorecard and team pages. That default duration can of course still be customized based on your specific needs.

Finally, we have updated folder names in the “Faros Reports” collection to better align with their respective modules: The "Quality and Testing" folder is now named "Software Quality", and "Value Stream Analysis" has been renamed "DevOps Management”.

These updates aim to enhance user experience, provide more accurate data insights, and offer greater flexibility in data analysis.

When a Faros Admin is setting a dashboard as a company favorite, they can choose to use a dynamic filter for the favorite. This means that anyone using the favorite link will see the dashboard automatically filtered to their own team.