MultiHub Forum

Our DevOps team is constantly firefighting and we're struggling to find time for actual improvement work. I'm looking for DevOps time management tools that can help us track where our time is going and identify bottlenecks in our processes.

I'm not just talking about project management tools like Jira, but specifically DevOps time management tools that help with automation, reducing manual work, and improving overall efficiency practices.

What tools have you used that actually helped your team get more done with less manual effort? I'm interested in anything from automation platforms to workflow optimization tools.

We started using Rundeck for workflow automation and it's been a great DevOps time management tool. We automated all our repetitive tasks - database backups, certificate renewals, cleanup jobs, etc. Saved us probably 10-15 hours per week of manual work.

Also, we implemented ChatOps with Slack bots for common operations. Instead of logging into servers or running commands manually, we can do things through Slack commands. Sounds small but it adds up.

We use Backstage as our internal developer portal. It's not specifically a DevOps time management tool, but it dramatically reduces context switching and time spent searching for information. Developers can find service documentation, deployment status, monitoring links, and runbooks all in one place.

The time saved from not having to hunt down information across different systems is huge. Probably our best investment in efficiency practices last year.

We implemented incident management automation with PagerDuty and it's saved us countless hours. Automated escalation policies, on-call scheduling, and post-incident review workflows have made our on-call experience much better.

Also, we started using feature flags extensively. Being able to toggle features without deploying has reduced our deployment frequency pressure and let us do more controlled rollouts.