Overview

CircleCI usage reports deliver comprehensive visibility into your CI/CD operations. By analyzing these reports, your team can identify cost-saving opportunities, enhance pipeline performance, and make more informed engineering decisions. The CircleCI Usage API generates detailed reports in CSV format, making it simple to import this data into your preferred data warehouse or business intelligence platform for advanced analysis and visualization.

Key Benefits

Cost Optimization

Usage reports allow you to closely monitor and manage your CircleCI expenditure:

• Track usage patterns across projects to identify opportunities for cost reduction
• Accurately allocate costs to specific teams, projects, or departments
• Support budget planning with precise historical usage data
• Identify underutilized resources that can be scaled down or reconfigured

Resource Planning

Make informed decisions about your CI/CD infrastructure:

• Forecast future needs based on historical usage trends
• Determine appropriate credit allocation for teams based on actual consumption
• Plan capacity for upcoming projects or product launches
• Understand cyclical or seasonal usage patterns

Performance Monitoring

Improve the efficiency of your development workflow:

• Identify workflows with excessive build times that may need optimization
• Track build failures and resource inefficiencies
• Monitor usage spikes that might indicate integration issues
• Compare performance metrics before and after optimization efforts

Compliance and Governance

Meet regulatory and internal requirements:

• Generate audit-ready reports for compliance requirements
• Enforce usage policies across your organization
• Document resource utilization for internal or external reviews
• Track compliance with service level agreements

Cross-Team Visibility

Create transparency across your organization:

• Provide engineering teams with insights about their resource consumption
• Compare efficiency metrics between different teams or projects
• Establish benchmarks for optimal CI/CD practices
• Foster a culture of resource awareness

Contract Negotiations

Strengthen your position during vendor discussions:

• Gather data to support negotiations for enterprise agreements
• Demonstrate actual usage patterns when discussing plan upgrades or changes
• Verify billing accuracy against contracted terms
• Quantify the value derived from your CircleCI investment

Incident Management

Maintain business continuity during service disruptions:

• Quantify impact during service disruptions
• Calculate credit consumption during irregular operations
• Document incident timelines and impact for post-mortems

Project Management

Integrate CI/CD metrics into your project planning:

• Track CI/CD costs as part of overall project budgets
• Measure build efficiency improvements over time
• Demonstrate ROI of DevOps investments
• Support data-driven decision making for future projects

Additional Resources: 

• CircleCI Usage API
• Script to automate generating and retrieving your organization's usage report
• Script to automate generating and retrieving usage reports for all organizations on a shared plan