DevImpact

Overview of the project

While developing a software, we rarely think about the resource footprint of our workflows, i.e, CPU usage, network activity and memory consumption, which ultimately translates into energy usage that leads to carbon emission.
Existing tools do share raw metrics but don’t address the real world impact of the activities.

To address this issue, I have built DevImpact, a real time developer observability system that tracks system level metrics and translates to cost and carbon estimates.

Beyond just tracking, it provides an intelligence layer on top of it, that tells you about the developer activities that includes builds, browsing activity or installation of dependencies and provides actionable insights to optimize performance and reduce environmental impact.

Goals of DevImpact

• Quantify system usage in terms of cost and carbon emissions
• Provide real-time visibility into system performance
• Interpret developer activities from system metrics
• Enable performance and resource optimization
• Reduce unnecessary compute and environmental impact
• Efficiently manage high-frequency telemetry data

Tech Stack Used

Backend

• Node js: Used to build REST apis for the ingesting and serving metrics data.
• Systeminformation library in node js: Collects real-time system metrics such as CPU load, memory usage, disk usage, and network activity.

Database

• MySQL: Used to store the high frequency metrics and summaries

Intelligence Layer

• Custom-built heuristic inference engine
• Maps system metrics → Developer activities
• Generates recommendation

Frontend

• Electron.js: Used to create a floating widget, always on top of monitor

Communication

• REST APIs (HTTP)
  • Agent → Backend (POST metrics)
  • Frontend → Backend (GET metrics, summary)

System Architecture

System Architecture High Level

Architecture Breakdown

Metric Agent

• Runs locally on developer machine
• Collects metrics every few seconds: CPU, Memory, Network, Disk usage
• Sends data to the backend via api

Backend API

• Built via express js
• Handles ingestion of metrics, enrichment and queries on frontend

Data Layer

• Two tier storage:
  • Stores data every few seconds to be used for real time analytics
  • Stores summaries hourly that includes averages, total count and prevents databases from growing infinitely

Intelligence layer

• Activity detection
• Recommendation engine
• Confidence scoring
• Time aware analysis

Presentation layer

• Real time view
• Always visible
• Shows carbon emission, usages of CPU, memory and network and activity + recommendation
• Dashboard (to be built)

Key Design Decision

• Used MYSQL for simplicity
• Implemented manual aggregation and retention
• Raw data for short retention and summaries for long term storage

Summary

DevImpact follows a pipeline architecture where system metrics are collected in real-time, processed into meaningful insights, stored efficiently using aggregation strategies, and surfaced through a lightweight UI with actionable recommendations.

🚀 Quick Start (CLI)

You can now run DevImpact directly from your terminal.

Installation

npm install -g dev-impact

Usage

Start Monitoring (Backend + Agent):

dev-impact start

Start Everything (Backend + Agent + UI Widget):

dev-impact start --ui

Launch UI Widget Only:

dev-impact ui

🛠 Setup & Development

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v16+)
• MySQL Server (running on localhost)

Manual Installation

1. Clone the repository.
2. Run the bulk install command:

   npm run install-all

3. Ensure MySQL has a database named infra_observer.