Using Analytics for Improvement

Set Targets

Use the analytics to set measurable goals. For example, "Increase IaC coverage by 10% next quarter" or "Reduce medium-severity policy violations to zero in prod by end of year." With Firefly tracking these, you can concretely see progress. The visual nature of graphs can be motivating when shown in team meetings ("we're almost at our target – just a bit more to go!").

Identify Patterns

Analytics might show, for example, drift spikes at end of each month – investigating reveals that's when manual patching was done on servers causing drift. The organization can respond by automating patching via code instead. Or you see one particular policy (say "No public S3") keeps getting violated – maybe the policy is too stringent and needs an exception process for static website buckets, or developers aren't aware of the setting – which signals a training need.

Share Success Stories

When analytics shows improvement, share it! If a certain team went from 50% to 100% IaC managed, congratulate them publicly. If cost savings were achieved, let finance know. Use Firefly's data to tell a story: e.g., "By codifying our infrastructure and cleaning up waste with Firefly, we avoided an estimated $50k in cloud costs this year, and significantly improved our security posture (as evidenced by 0 critical violations in 3 months)." These concrete outcomes can support continued investment in IaC and tooling.

Capacity and Asset Growth

Another use of analytics is to track asset count growth. Firefly knows how many resources you have; a trend line of "Total assets under management" could be part of analytics. If you see explosive growth, that might indicate the need for cost planning or architecture review. If growth is flat or declining, maybe you're in an optimization phase. It's like a cloud CMDB graph. Combine this with IaC coverage, and you can ensure that as you add resources, they're consistently managed by IaC (ideally the IaC coverage line stays high even as asset count grows).