OpsLevel Logo
Product

Visibility

Catalog

Keep an automated record of truth

Integrations

Unify your entire tech stack

AI Engine

Restoring knowledge & generating insight

Standards

Scorecards

Measure and improve software health

Campaigns

Action on cross-cutting initiatives with ease

Checks

Get actionable insights

Developer Autonomy

Service Templates

Spin up new services within guardrails

Self-service Actions

Empower devs to do more on their own

Knowledge Center

Tap into API & Tech Docs in one single place

Featured Resource

Click-through Tour: OpsLevel Overview
Click-through Tour: OpsLevel Overview
Read more
Use Cases

Use cases

Improve Standards

Set and rollout best practices for your software

Drive Ownership

Build accountability and clarity into your catalog

Developer Experience

Free up your team to focus on high-impact work

Featured Resource

The Ultimate Guide to Microservices Versioning Best Practices
The Ultimate Guide to Microservices Versioning Best Practices
Read more
Customers
Our customers

We support leading engineering teams to deliver high-quality software, faster.

More customers
Hudl
Hudl goes from Rookie to MVP with OpsLevel
Read more
Hudl
Keller Williams
Keller Williams’ software catalog becomes a vital source of truth
Read more
Keller Williams
Duolingo
How Duolingo automates service creation and maintenance to tackle more impactful infra work
Read more
Duolingo
Resources
Our resources

Explore our library of helpful resources and learn what your team can do with OpsLevel.

All resources

Resource types

Blog

Resources, tips, and the latest in engineering insights

Guide

Practical resources to roll out new programs and features

Demo

Videos of our product and features

Events

Live and on-demand conversations

Interactive Demo

See OpsLevel in action

Pricing

Flexible and designed for your unique needs

Docs
Log In
Book a demo
Log In
Book a demo
No items found.
Share this
Book a demo
Table of contents
 link
 
Resources
Blog

The ROI of visibility: how OpsLevel gives developers their time back

No items found.
The ROI of visibility: how OpsLevel gives developers their time back
Megan Dorcey
|
May 1, 2025

The hidden tax on every engineering team

Context-switching isn’t just annoying; it’s expensive. Any time a developer leaves their editor to hunt for “Who owns this Lambda?” or to check if a library is past end-of-life, the clock is running. Multiply that by dozens of small detours each week and a 50-person team is easily losing hundreds of hours a month.

To understand the scale of the problem—and whether OpsLevel actually moves the needle—we surveyed 100+ engineers across our customer teams of all sizes. The headline finding: Developers report saving an average of 1.7 hours every week after adopting OpsLevel.

That may sound modest, but for a 50-engineer org it equates to 4,100 reclaimed engineering hours a year—roughly two full-time developers’ worth of capacity.

Below, we unpack where those hours come from, pairing hard numbers with anonymized quotes straight from the survey.

Instant visibility: the catalog as a productivity engine

‍

Seeing which team owns which repo/service saves me a Slack thread every time. - Staff Engineer

‍

Nearly two-thirds of respondents cited “Visibility” as the primary benefit. A centralized catalog turns “tribal knowledge” into searchable facts:

‍

By surfacing repository links, deployment dashboards, runbooks, and on-call information in a single click, OpsLevel erases the 20-minute scavenger hunts that punctuate a developer’s day. Individually small, together they form the bulk of the 1.7-hour weekly win.

Ownership clarity: ending the “who owns this?” spiral

“I search for repos and their owners in seconds.” – Software Engineer
“Now I know who to page before an incident escalates.” – Engineering Manager

“Who owns this?” was the second most-mentioned pain point. OpsLevel’s Detected Services feature listens to Git activity, auto-creates catalog entries, and suggests owners based on commit history. No more orphaned services, no more unplanned outages because an alert routed to a stale distribution list.

Quantifiable impact

  • Fewer “incidents of unknown ownership” in PagerDuty
  • Faster MTTR because the right engineer is looped in immediately
  • Reduced cognitive load—developers don’t juggle a mental map of org charts

Even in small teams, this clarity translates to reclaimed hours and lowered stress.

Enforcing standards & maturity without the policing overhead

“Setting quality standards used to be quarterly homework. Now scorecards surface drift in real time.” – Platform Lead

Twenty percent of respondents pointed to Scorecards and Maturity Levels as their biggest gain. Instead of one-off audits, OpsLevel runs automated checks—lint rules, dependency age, security scan status—and displays a live health score on every service page.

Why it matters

Manual audits: 2–3 days of work per team each quarter.
Automated scorecards: minutes to review, immediate feedback loops.

Teams didn’t just save audit time; they reported shipping fewer hotfixes because standards stayed above the waterline between quarters.

Campaigns & automation: scaling initiatives across dozens of teams

“The campaigns keep us at Gold level without shoulder-tapping each team lead.” – Staff Engineer, Security

When security or platform teams need to roll out an org-wide change—say, upgrading a runtime or applying a new SCA policy—Campaigns track progress, send reminders, and block merges where needed. Respondents who rely on Campaigns logged the highest time-savings band (6 hours +) in the survey.

A single pane for security & risk posture

“Aggregating data from multiple scanners into one portal gives me the real picture.” – Staff Security Engineer

While less frequent in raw counts, security leaders view OpsLevel as their source of truth for vulnerability status, unpatched libraries, and unsupported runtimes. The value is measured not just in hours, but in avoided breaches and compliance headaches.

‍

Assumes $100/hour fully-loaded cost, 48 working weeks.

That’s capacity you can redirect toward roadmap features, tech-debt clean-ups, or incident-reduction work.

Beyond the spreadsheet: retention, morale, and platform culture

Survey comments made it clear that hours saved are only part of the story—developers also highlighted the feel-good dividends of having OpsLevel in their daily toolkit:

  • Less toil: “I spend my energy on building, not chasing.”
  • Confidence: “I know our services meet the bar—continually.”
  • Autonomy: “Self-service onboarding means I don’t wait on another team.”

Those intangibles have tangible payoffs. Teams that called out automation and standards wins were also the ones most vocal about sticking with OpsLevel long-term. Keeping senior engineers engaged and productive can save far more than the hourly ROI alone—replacement costs for a single experienced developer often exceed their annual salary.

Ready to reclaim time—and momentum?

Thousands of developers now treat OpsLevel as the central axis of their daily work. Whether you’re wrestling with service sprawl, ownership confusion, or the endless march of compliance work, the data from our customer base show that even a conservative deployment nets days of engineering time every month.

See what that looks like inside your org by booking a 30-minute demo.

‍

More resources

Fast code, firm control: A leadership report on AI coding adoption
Blog
Fast code, firm control: A leadership report on AI coding adoption

AI is writing your code; are you ready?

Read more
March Product Updates
Blog
March Product Updates

Some of the big releases from the month of March.

Read more
How Generative AI Is Changing Software Development: Key Insights from the DORA Report
Blog
How Generative AI Is Changing Software Development: Key Insights from the DORA Report

Discover the key findings from the 2024 DORA Report on Generative AI in Software Development. Learn how OpsLevel’s AI-powered tools enhance productivity, improve code quality, and simplify documentation, while helping developers avoid common pitfalls of AI adoption.

Read more
Product
Software catalogMaturityIntegrationsSelf-serviceKnowledge CenterBook a meeting
Company
About usCareersContact usCustomersPartnersSecurity
Resources
DocsEventsBlogPricingDemoGuide to Internal Developer PortalsGuide to Production Readiness
Comparisons
OpsLevel vs BackstageOpsLevel vs CortexOpsLevel vs Atlassian CompassOpsLevel vs Port
Subscribe
Join our newsletter to stay up to date on features and releases.
By subscribing you agree to with our Privacy Policy and provide consent to receive updates from our company.
SOC 2AICPA SOC
© 2024 J/K Labs Inc. All rights reserved.
Terms of Use
Privacy Policy
Responsible Disclosure
By using this website, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Data Processing Agreement for more information.
Okay!