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

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.

‍

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.

‍