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Push metrics to leadership dashboards (Grafana / BI)

Engineers live in Understand; leadership lives in dashboards. You can bridge the two by exporting Understand's metrics on a schedule and feeding them into whatever your organization already watches — Grafana, a BI tool, or a shared spreadsheet — so managers see code-health trends without anyone learning a new tool.

1. Export metrics headlessly

The und metrics command produces the same data as the Metrics Browser, from the command line — ideal for a scheduled job:

# Project-wide CSV, one row per entity (columns come from the metric settings)
und metrics project.und

# Per-architecture rollup (great for leadership — one row per subsystem)
und metrics -arch MySubsystems project.und

Pick the exact columns and format with und settings -metric …. The full command reference and the GUI equivalents are in Export & track metrics over time.

Roll up by architecture, not by file

Leadership wants subsystem-level trends, not thousands of function rows. Build an architecture that matches how the org thinks about the product, then export -arch so each row is a component leaders recognize.

2. Schedule it

Run the export automatically so the dashboard stays current:

3. Feed the dashboard

Point your dashboard at the exported data:

  • Grafana / BI — ingest the CSV (or load it into the database/table your dashboard already reads). Each scheduled export becomes a new data point, so you get trend lines over releases.
  • Spreadsheet — the CSV opens directly; chart the columns you care about (CCViolDensityCode, average Cyclomatic, coverage, custom metrics).

The Entity_Uniquename column lets your dashboard match the same entity across runs even when names collide.

Understand doesn't ship a Grafana connector

The integration is via the exported files/data, not a built-in plugin — which is what keeps it tool-agnostic. Any dashboard that can read a CSV or a table can consume it.

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