Built by people who read engineering orgs for a living.

Why Deckgauge exists

Walking into a company as a fractional CTO, the first job is always the same: work out how delivery actually runs. Where the work is, what's stuck, who's overloaded, whether the roadmap has any relationship to reality. That answer is scattered across Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and a few spreadsheets, and assembling it by hand takes weeks that nobody is paying for.

So we built the thing that assembles it automatically — one board over every source, with the DORA, flow, review and investment metrics derived from data the team already produces. We used it on our own engagements first. It turned out to be the part clients asked to keep, which is a reasonable signal that it should be available to everyone.

How we think about metrics

Engineering metrics have a bad reputation because they are usually deployed badly — as individual scorecards, as targets attached to performance reviews, as surveillance. All three destroy the thing they claim to measure. The positions baked into this product:

• Measure the system, not the person. DORA was designed for teams. Tie it to an individual's review and you have built an incentive to game it. See measuring engineers without surveillance.
• Label proxies as proxies. If you haven't connected a deployment or incident source, deployment frequency and time-to-restore are estimates. Deckgauge says so on the widget rather than quietly presenting an estimate as a measurement.
• Show the working. Every widget page in the reference documents what the number is built from, which providers feed it, and how it can mislead you. A metric you can't audit is a metric you shouldn't act on.
• Individual figures are decision support, not a rating. Per-person numbers exist to start a conversation and find who needs a hand — never to rank people automatically. An aggregate-only mode that switches per-individual breakdowns off entirely is designed and built to order; it is not in the product today.

Open source, and what that means here

The full platform is on GitHub under the Functional Source License — you can read it, run it, modify it and self-host it for any purpose except building a competing commercial product. There is no seat cap, and the metrics are not feature-gated. A separate enterprise module adds multi-organization deployment, managed hosting and priority support; see editions for how that module loads and what a license does.

Deckgauge is self-hosted by default. Your delivery data stays in your own Postgres and ClickHouse, the provider credentials you supply are read-only, and Jira is never written to. The privacy policy covers what this website collects, which is a separate and much smaller question.

A note on bylines

Posts here are signed "the CodPal team" rather than an individual. Deckgauge is a company's platform, maintained by a company, and we would rather the writing be accountable to that than to one person's profile. Everything we publish is reviewed by people who use these metrics in live engagements.

Frequently asked

Who builds Deckgauge?

Deckgauge is built and maintained by CodPal, a fractional CTO-as-a-service firm working with startups and scale-ups. The platform started as internal tooling for CodPal engagements and was released as open source so any engineering leader can run it.

Is Deckgauge really free?

Yes. The Community edition is free and source-available under the Functional Source License, with no seat cap and no feature gating on metrics. A separate enterprise module adds multi-organization deployment, a managed hosting option and priority support.

Where does my data go?

Nowhere. Deckgauge is self-hosted: it runs on your own hardware in Docker, connects to Jira, GitHub, GitLab and Azure DevOps with read-only credentials you supply, and stores everything in your own Postgres and ClickHouse. There is no Deckgauge cloud in the Community edition and no telemetry back to us.

Does Deckgauge write to Jira or GitHub?

No. Jira is strictly read-only, and the provider integrations only ever read issues, pull requests, commits and review activity. Deckgauge cannot modify anything in your source systems.

How do I get help or report a security issue?

Open an issue on the GitHub repository at github.com/Codpal-Limited/deckgauge for bugs and feature requests, or email [email protected]. Security reports should go to [email protected] directly rather than a public issue.

Get in touch

Bugs and feature requests belong on GitHub issues. Anything else — including security reports and enterprise enquiries — goes to [email protected]. You can also follow CodPal on LinkedIn.