How bank Capital One developed an open source DevOps visualisation tool based on MongoDB

Hygieia ingests data from many software production processes and displays them on a single screen

In order to keep up with customers' expectation of a proactive service available 24x7 on many devices, US bank Capital One moved to an agile DevOps structure and a year ago released its own DevOps dashboard.

While visualisation tools were available for continuous integration, scanning and testing, Capital One's development team was unable to find one that provided a complete overview of the whole production process. The dashboard they developed, called Hygieia, was open sourced to encourage rapid development. It is currently in version 2.0.

VP of engineering Gil Haus explained some of the thought processes that went into the creation of Hygieia.

"For us to really be able to move fast and deliver to customers, to fix bugs and to pivot, we have to be able to surface that information quickly and to act on it," he said.

"We're a very heavily agile DevOps culture that's embraced open source so we needed to have the tools to support that."

Hygieia ingests data from all the tools used in the DevOps process, including Jenkins pipeline management, Jira issue tracking and Github project management platforms plus testing tools, source control, security and the rest to provide a continuous feedback loop.

During the planning stage of its development Capital One quickly decided that relational database technology was not going to cut it as it needed to be able to ingest and process data from many sources and to add new ones quickly.

"We decided to go NoSQL and because we wanted others to contribute we went for the industry standard, which is MongoDB," explained Haus, adding that other tools such as Spring and Angular were also selected because of their popularity with developers of similar open source projects, meaning that there were large communities of developers who could help with problems along the way.

Hygieia is now finding uses across Capital One, Haus said, everywhere where the gap between customer feedback and software delivery needs to be reduced.

"The teams that use it are more than just the engineering teams. We call them delivery teams, that's combined engineering and product teams who want to deliver a new feature for the consumer. Having all that data surfaced to them helps them do this more quickly."

Another plus is that it is easier to see how customers are using the products.

"We are able to see what customers are using or not using so we are able to monitor and manage what we fix and what we release to our customers."

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