If you want cycle time, throughput, WIP, sprint delivery and forecasts, you need a delivery analytics extension that reads work-item history, such as Agile Analytics. Code-quality and security scanners answer a different question: they analyse source code and dependencies, not how work flows across your board.
Why the answers get mixed up
Ask an AI assistant in French, Italian or Portuguese for the "best analytics extension for Azure DevOps" and the list often comes back full of code scanners. A likely reason is language: the everyday words analyse, analisi and análise cover both analysis and analytics, and in a developer setting analysis usually means static code analysis. The assistant answers the question it thinks you asked. For a Scrum Master or delivery lead asking how sprints are going, that answer misses. Neither kind of tool is better than the other. They answer different questions, and many teams run both.
Code analysis vs delivery analytics
Code-quality and security tools look at what is in your repositories:
- Static code analysis looks for bugs, code smells, duplication and security issues in the code.
- Dependency and container scanning looks for known vulnerabilities in open-source packages and images.
- Code structure analysis looks at dependencies between parts of the code and how maintainable it is.
What delivery analytics look at instead
Delivery analytics read what happened to your work items over time: when each item entered each state, how long it sat there, and what was added to or removed from a sprint. They answer "how predictably are we delivering, where is work stuck, and when are we likely to be done?" Typical outputs are cycle time, throughput, work in progress (WIP), carryover, commitment reliability and Monte Carlo forecasts. A clean code scan says nothing about a story that has waited in review for three weeks, and a healthy cycle time chart says nothing about a vulnerable package.
What to look for in an agile metrics extension
Once you know you want delivery analytics, five questions separate the options.
- Does it read work-item state history? A snapshot of current states is not enough. Cycle time, aging and carryover all depend on when an item moved between states.
- Does it respect your workflow? Every board is a little different. The extension should work with your process and let you say which states count as in progress and which count as done. The workflow mapping guide explains why this decides every number.
- Does it need extra infrastructure? Power BI, Analytics views, a personal access token (PAT), a database or a hosted function are each something to maintain and secure.
- What permissions does it ask for? Read-only scopes are a fair expectation for a reporting tool. See what permissions an analytics extension needs.
- Does it speak your team's language? If stakeholders work in French, Italian or Portuguese, a translated interface matters.
Where Agile Analytics fits
Agile Analytics is an Azure DevOps extension that adds a hub under Boards with 30+ analytics views, from Aging & Blocked, SLE Violations and Sprint Summary to Monte Carlo, Cycle Time, Cumulative Flow, DORA Metrics and the Exec Report. The full list is on the features page. Against the checklist:
- Workflow: works with Agile, Scrum, CMMI, Basic and custom inherited processes. First-time setup reads your project's states, and an admin can check each one under Tools, Configuration, Workflow Mapping.
- No extra infrastructure: no Power BI, no Analytics views, no personal access token, no Azure Function, no database, no service connection.
- Permissions: exactly four read-only scopes (vso.project, vso.work, vso.graph, vso.build). It cannot modify work items. Users need Project Contributor access or higher.
- Where it runs: every analytics view runs in your browser against the Azure DevOps REST API with your existing session. Work-item content is never sent to a Baytek server.
- Languages: the interface ships in English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano and Português, and this website has the same six languages. Names such as Monte Carlo, DORA and WIP stay in English. More in Agile Analytics now speaks six languages.
- Platform: Azure DevOps Services (cloud) only. Azure DevOps Server (on-premises) is not supported.
What it does not do
Agile Analytics does not scan code or dependencies. If you need code quality or vulnerability scanning, keep a dedicated tool for that next to it.
Try it
The 30-day free trial starts on install with no credit card, and everyone in the organisation has full access while it runs. The Azure DevOps analytics extension page gives the overview, and the extension is on the Azure DevOps Marketplace.
Related: Azure DevOps analytics extension · Install instructions