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Welcome to the August edition of the Rely.io Product Roundup! We’re thrilled to announce our biggest release to date, packed with powerful new features and enhancements. This month, we’re focused on increasing developer autonomy and productivity (yet while enhancing compliance with organizational standards!), delivering deeper data insights, and providing improved visualization and customization capabilities.
From empowering you with more control over your workflows to offering advanced tools for data analysis and dashboard customization, this release is all about making your experience with Rely.io better than ever. Let’s dive in!
Faster yet more secure developer experience with Self Service Actions
We're excited to announce the full rollout of our Self-Service feature, which was previously in closed beta. This powerful tool significantly enhances developer autonomy and productivity by allowing teams to handle a wider range of actions directly within Rely.io.
Default Actions
Building on our initial beta release, we’ve vastly expanded our catalog of default actions to cover both complex, time-consuming tasks and everyday routine actions.
With this update, you can now automate actions like scaffolding services, provisioning infrastructure, and creating developer environments - tasks that typically require significant time and effort. In addition, we’ve included a range of default actions to streamline daily routines, such as declaring incidents or requesting an increased TTL on a development environment, and many more.
Custom Actions
Beyond our expanded default catalog, we now offer Custom Actions. This feature enables you to use our default actions as a starting point and tailor them to better fit your specific needs, or even build entirely new actions from scratch. Whether you need to tweak a default action or create something unique to your workflow, Custom Actions provide the flexibility and control to make it happen.
Approval System
For those actions that need an extra layer of security, we’ve added an Approval System. Now, you can ensure that all critical actions are reviewed and approved before execution, adding a layer of governance to your processes.
Historical Runs
Transparency is key. With Historical Runs, you can now review all past actions, providing clear insights into what changes were made and when. This feature helps you track changes over time and maintain accountability.
Instant value from Day One with Smart Defaults
Our Smart Defaults, part of this month’s release, are designed to provide immediate, valuable insights by automatically populating your app with default views right from your first integration, typically with a git provider like GitLab, GitHub, or Bitbucket. This ensures that your team can start leveraging actionable data insights from the moment you integrate with Rely.io.
Smart Default will then provide additional value and get further automatically populated as you add more integrations, like Incident Management or Observability tools.
Homepage Defaults
To get you started quickly, we automatically create home pages dedicated to the use cases you care about every day. A few examples:
- My Overview: provides a snapshot of your current and incoming on-call rotations, services your team owns, the number of ongoing alerts, incidents, and other key metrics.
- Incident Management: provides a quick access into the actual list of active incidents and alerts, the runbooks and escalation policies to follow, and more.
- Production Health: provides an aggregated view of all your key performance metrics (like golden signals for your services) as well as links to relevant resources and dashboards in your various Observability tools (Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc).
These pages are all designed to deliver immediate insights without any setup required.
Customization Options
We recognize that every team and individual has unique needs. That’s why we allow users to customize these default pages extensively. Whether you want to filter out certain default widgets, add new widgets to your liking, or create entirely new pages as tabs and populate them with widgets that best serve your personal workflow, the choice is yours. This flexibility ensures that the homepage reflects exactly what you care about most.
Software Catalog Defaults
Just like with homepages, we’ve created default views for key entities such as services, teams, and more within your software catalog. These views are crafted to give an immediate overview of the most critical information for each entity, so you always have a clear picture.
Use Case-Specific Pages
On top of these default views, we’ve introduced specific, use case-driven pages for each entity. For instance, teams now have a "Productivity" tab that automatically displays calculated DORA metrics. These tailored pages are designed to surface the most relevant data for each use case, providing deeper insights with minimal configuration.
With Smart Defaults, your team is equipped with meaningful, actionable views right from the start, while still allowing for the customization needed to make the platform your own.
Services and Teams come with out-of-the-box DORA metrics thanks to the new Calculation Properties
To help you derive deeper insights from your data, we’ve introduced Calculated Properties, available for both Entities and Scorecards.
For Entities
Calculated Properties allow you to create dynamic fields that perform calculations based on your data. This means you can derive new insights directly within your entities, without needing external tools.
For Scorecards
Extend the power of Calculated Properties to your Scorecards. Now, you can set up complex calculations to better analyze performance metrics and drive data-informed decisions.
These new properties support both numerical values and time series allowing to compute and store either aggregated values or historical trends.
Internally, Calculated Properties are already powering our newly released Smart Defaults (for instance to determine DORA metrics time series, the count of incidents & alerts, etc.). For you, they can be used to better track your KPIs without manual work or limitations that come with static documents like spreadsheets. You can now make better informed decision thanks to always up-to-date data!
Improved Dashboards and Widgets for a Better User Experience
We’re continuously refining the platform to improve your experience. This month, we’ve made several enhancements to our dashboards and widgets:
Dashboards in Homepages
Previously Homepages only supported lists of specific entities (e.g. “My Services” or “My Assigned PRs”) but already allowed detailed customization to each user thanks to saved filters. Homepages have now been updated to support widgets! Now you can not only list entities but also compose your pages to fit your exact needs thanks to the same full suite of widgets and canvas experience our Dashboards offer.
New Widgets
Line Chart
Visualize trends over time with the new Line Chart widget, perfect for tracking changes and patterns in your data. For instance,
Self-service Actions
Provide self-service actions to your teams directly from any dashboard and improve developer efficiency and reduce context switching.
Related Entities
Gain better visibility of interconnected data points with the Related Entities widget, making complex data relationships easier to understand.
Improved widgets
Property Group
We’ve enhanced the Property Group widget with better alignment to make all property keys and values cleanly aligned on a grid. This change enables a much cleaner and less busy experience in your views, making them much easier to consume and drive insights from.
Property Value
All Property Value widgets now include descriptions, providing more context and clarity to your data points.
URLs in all Widgets
All links displayed in tables or widgets have been updated to support a more user friendly experience. They are now displayed as icons and automatically fetch the link’s favicon whenever it is available, making it ever easier to understand at a glance what’s behind the link.
Expanded Integrations: Connect More Tools to Your Workflow
We’re excited to announce new integrations that further extend the capabilities of Rely.io:
- BitBucket Integration: Streamline your development workflow with our new BitBucket integration. You can now import your repositories into your services and attach to them relevant entities like Pull Requests, Deployments, Environments and more. With our plug-and-play plugin, import all relevant entities from BitBucket in your catalog, automatically mapped to your other entities.
- OpsGenie Integration: Pull incidents, on-call rotations and more from your Incident Management tool and augment your catalog accordingly. Incidents are attached to your Services, DORA metrics computed and your Smart Default views are automatically augmented with for instance on-call rotations added to your users.
Conclusion
August has been a month of significant improvements and new features aimed at enhancing your experience with Rely.io. From the powerful Self-Service release to the addition of Calculated Properties and new integrations, we’re committed to helping you get the most out of our platform.
Stay tuned for more updates next month. As always, don't hesitate to reach out with feedback or questions—and be sure to explore our live demo!
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