One of the goals of Octopus Deploy is to be an information radiator. When your deployment process consists of "some guy" running a bunch of batch files, it's hard for other people on your team (and the stakeholders) to get an insight into what is going on. What deployments are currently running? What deployments finished in the last hour?
Octopus tries to make that information front and center on the dashboard. You can see the output of deployments, which deployments are running, and a history of deployments. You can see how a release progressed from development through to production, all within one interface.
Until now, one of the questions that Octopus hasn't been able to answer is who performed an action. Today's release includes a fist cut at implementing this feature:
Octopus now records:
- Who queued a deployment, and who cancelled it
- Who created or modified a release
- Who changed project steps or variables
This information will start to get richer over time, and we'll have other ways to slice it. For example, someday, I can imagine a 'user' page which shows all of the activity by a particular user, complete with an RSS feed. This is just the beginning, but hopefully it's a feature you'll find useful. I'd love to hear your feedback!
