Changelog

Enhanced dashboard summaries now allow analysts to easily integrate AI-generated summaries into dashboards and automate delivery, providing end-users with seamless access to key information. Previously, users accessed these summaries by clicking a button. Now you can integrate Lighthouse Summaries as components within dashboards or leverage our automation engine to automatically distribute summaries via Slack, email, or other preferred channels.  

This means faster insights, better decisions, and a more connected understanding of your data, all without leaving your preferred workflow.

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We’re excited to introduce some powerful updates to our dashboard experience! These enhancements give you greater flexibility and control, making it easier than ever to construct the perfect dashboard.

Iframe Cards: Embed iframes into your dashboards to display things like loom videos, notion docs and more. If you have a custom domain you’d like to embed, please reach out to us.

Time Grouping Widget: Easily adjust how your charts are grouped by time—switch between months, weeks, or days to analyze your data with greater precision.

Enhanced Tooltips: Tooltips are now more powerful and customizable, allowing you to include a wider range of metrics for deeper insights.

Sunburst Charts: A brand-new visualization option to explore your data in an intuitive and dynamic way.

Pivot Table Downloads: You can now download all of your pivot tables with ease.

Offset Expression: Include base calculations based on other rows – just like excel!

There is much more! Everything from improved case statements, to templates, to better editing — ask us for details on a full list of new features!

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One pain point we’ve repeatedly heard from senior engineering managers and security/infra domain leads is the lack of visibility into the codebase’s security risks. This information tends to be scattered across multiple tools, preventing a unified view of the work to be done, which often leads to lingering vulnerabilities and missed SLAs.

We are launching a new Software Security module that helps you see the full picture and identify which repositories and teams need urgent attention. These new capabilities help ensure teams meet their SLAs, address security vulnerabilities, and reduce the company’s risk exposure.

Key benefits:

• Resolve vulnerabilities within SLAs with real-time tracking and team alerts for pending or overdue patches.
• Identify the most vulnerable parts of the codebase with a single unified view of security findings, and measure the ROI of security activities over time
• Monitor team-level security performance with vulnerability resolution performance. Identify which teams require more support or education on security best practices.

Faros Automations leverage all your Faros data to remove friction and toil in day-to-day engineering operations. Automations can send alerts and reminders, enforce policies, and optimize workflows.

Faros is partnering with active-pieces, a best-in-class drag and drop automation engine. With Faros Automations, you can build cross-tool, time-saving automations that help improve speed, efficiency, quality, engagement, and business impact.

And, like so many parts of Faros, it's completely customizable. Faros Automations let you generate any action based on your Faros Data!

For example, you can:

• Take action faster with alerting around any generated metrics - Escalate breaches to SLA's with a PagerDuty integration
• Automate cognitively routine tasks - If someone hasn't contributed to a service in a month, remove their access
• Encourage best practices - Notify people on Slack when their GitHub PRs are consistently above the desired diff size
• Create more adaptive governance / policies based on multiple inputs - Add gate to Kubernetes that ensures PR can't be merged until team Quality metrics are improved

To start leveraging Faros Automations please reach out to our team at support@faros.ai

Stay informed with real-time alerts! We've added notifications to keep you updated whenever your data connections experience any issues, ensuring you can address problems promptly.

We have recently introduced DuckDB, a lightning-fast, in-memory database built for handling massive datasets.

The result? Dashboards now load up to 2.5x faster on average, with a whopping 2.8x improvement in P95 load times. That means less waiting and more time for valuable insights.

Our customers are thrilled with the transformation. As one of our Business Value Engineers put it:

"I spent my first day working in the tenant post-DuckDB migration yesterday. I needed to update a chart that used to be a coin toss on whether it’d load in 30 seconds or timeout. Now? It loads in under a second. Mind. Blown."

Improved Data Refresh for Faster Analytics

As we scale at Faros, we remain committed to improving the speed and reliability of our dashboards and metrics. Wit this in mind, we've focussed on the delivering the following features for our customers:

• Incremental data extraction: Efficient data replication into reports database.
• Optimizing flow queries: Streamlined data processing for faster transfer.
• Incremental metrics rebuilds: Ensures updates only include new or changed data, minimizing processing time.
  

These improvements have resulted in a 65% decrease in average sync times!

What’s the CFO’s biggest complaint about Engineering? That Finance simply does not understand how engineering’s output ties back to corporate strategy and objectives.

We’re solving that problem with a new Investment Strategy intelligence module that creates a joint understanding of the effectiveness and impact of software engineering investments.

With this new set of out-of-the-box dashboards for engineering and CFOs, as leaders you can:

• Assess the efficiency and financial impact of engineering initiatives
• Benchmark engineering overhead and team ratios against industry standards
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your talent mix and offshoring strategy
• Monitor the allocation of resources and time spent on critical company initiatives

The Investment Strategy Module is a premium add-on in the Faros platform; please contact Faros for more information.

We have released an App on the GitHub Marketplace to help engineering leaders evaluate the impact of GitHub Copilot on productivity and outcomes.

This App provides dashboards that help your organization confidently transition from pilots and evaluations to large-scale adoption.

We help:

• Track adoption and understand usage over time
• Measure the time savings and economic benefit
• Identify which teams benefit the most and how saved time is being reinvested
• Capture developer sentiment with out-of-the-box developer surveys
• Benchmark speed, quality, and security improvements against peers
• Observe before and after metrics, and compare the performance of Copilot-enabled developers vs. their peers

Benefits:

This set of Faros AI dashboards measures the impact of GitHub Copilot on software engineering and helps you get the rollout right.

• Improve rollout, training, and mentoring by understanding which teams and roles are adopting the fastest
• Easily present metrics and findings to executive leadership, helping to set the right expectations
• See where constraints and bottlenecks are emerging and mitigate unintended consequences quickly
• Identify unused licenses to maximize value

The AI Copilot Evaluation Module helps you maximize the value of coding assistants such as Github Copilot, Amazon Code Whisperer and others.

This module provides a view into adoption, developer sentiment, and downstream impact to help your organization:

• Track adoption and use over time
• Measure the time savings and economic benefit
• Identify which teams benefit the most and how saved time is being reinvested
• Monitor speed, quality, and security to mitigate unintended consequences and maximize value

Faros has upgraded its charting tool to include the dashboard tabs, downloadable charts and dashboards, improved layout, and more!

• Keep dashboards organized with tabs. Tabbed navigation helps consume the dashboard in smaller logical bites while persisting filters from tab to tab.
• Sharing is easier with downloadable dashboards. Skip the screenshots! One-click PDF export is now available for dashboards.
• Improved dashboard layout with an expanded grid. Get the polish and symmetry you like with a dashboard grid that’s grown from 18 to 24 squares.
• Auto-hide cards with no data. No data equals no clutter with this new feature. Keep things tidy and easier to consume by setting cards to auto-hide if they return no results.
• Load dashboards faster. You control when to apply filters instead of auto-applying them upon each change.
• Auto-wire up dashboard field filters. Filters are automatically connected to new cards you add to a dashboard.

We're excited to enhance your experience with a significant update to our web application. While local sources have always been a part of your data toolkit, you can now monitor these sources directly on the 'Manage Sources' page of our platform. This update centralizes the visibility of all data importation methods, enabling you to effortlessly oversee and debug issues across both local and cloud-based sources.

With the change, you can now view the configuration, see sync status and explore the sync history in the Sources page for every connector, whether local or cloud-based. Sync logs are also available in the Faros web application, making it even easier to debug issues with your team and with the help of Faros Support.

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.