Tracking KPIs is definitely a must-have, isn’t it? What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of DevOps KPIs and metrics?
First off, we’d like to say that the first thing on our mind is to help out the people who may need to carefully consider the best ways of tracking DevOps KPIs given that new needs have cropped up in DevOps culture. It doesn’t particularly matter whether you are a CTO, entrepreneur, manager, or all-in-one. True leaders need to know the cream of the crop in the fields they are passionate about. For the time being, our passion is to discuss and discover the vital DevOps KPIs and metrics.
When it comes to the most important DevOps KPIs and metrics, we simply cannot stand by. It seems pretty interesting, isn’t it? Besides, who does not like a challenge?
Errare humanum est but the most common mistake companies make when they start measuring their KPIs is to try to measure way too much. Sounds familiar, right? How can you measure progress if you don’t know which KPI to use? That’s the issue with this approach. Without a clear idea of your goals, it’s impossible to determine whether you’re making progress or failing.
Let’s take a closer look. Shall we?
Importance of tracking DevOps KPIs
Tracking KPIs is necessary on various grounds:
- Measuring and Improving Performance: DevOps KPIs help to measure the achievement of your DevOps processes and identify areas that require improvement. By tracking the right KPIs, you can gain insights into how your team is performing and identify bottlenecks or areas for optimization.
- Identifying Problems Early: DevOps KPIs can help pinpoint problems early on before they become major ones. We are not making mountains out of molehills but by monitoring KPIs such as deployment frequency or lead time, you can spot issues and take action in time.
- Communicating with Stakeholders: DevOps KPIs can provide an effective way to communicate with stakeholders, including executives, customers, and other teams. By sharing KPIs, you can provide a clear and objective view of your team’s performance, demonstrate progress, and build confidence in your processes.
- Keeping up the Pace: DevOps KPIs are an essential part of a continuous improvement process. By setting targets and tracking progress, you can identify areas for improvement and take action to make iterative changes. This approach helps to optimize your DevOps processes and deliver better outcomes over time.
10 Top DevOps KPIs to track
Due to the lack of a formal framework, defining progress in DevOps KPIs can be challenging as it can vary across organizations. Nonetheless, there are certain metrics and KPIs that are commonly used to ensure that a DevOps project stays on course.
The top DevOps KPIs and metrics vary depending on your organization’s goals, size, and industry. Nowadays the most popular tracked DevOps KPIs and metrics are deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recover (MTTR), change failure rate, and customer satisfaction.
By tracking these KPIs, you can gain insights into how your team is performing and identify areas for improvement.
1) Deployment Frequency
This metric measures how often code changes are deployed to production. In addition, a high deployment frequency indicates that your team can respond quickly to changing requirements and customer needs.
2) Lead Time for Changes
We all want to know how much time it takes to move a code change from development to production. A low lead time indicates that for some reason your team does not have enough time on their hands to deliver it on time.
3) Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
It helps to calculate the time it takes to recover from a service outage or incident. A poor MTTR indicates that your team can respond quickly and effectively to service disruptions.
4) Change Failure Rate
This metric is a must as it computes the percentage of changes that result in failures or defects. A blowback here indicates that your team can deliver high-quality changes that do not negatively impact customers.
5) Customer Satisfaction
This one is equally important given that it meters customer satisfaction with your product or service. It is essential to ensure that your team is delivering value to customers and meeting their needs on time.
6) Code Coverage
Do not forget about this when you need to count the percentage of code that is covered by automated tests. A high code coverage indicates that your team is delivering high-quality code that is thoroughly tested.
7) Time to Detect (TTD)
We believe it’s imperative to estimate the time it takes to detect a service outage or incident. A low TTD indicates that your team can quickly identify and respond to service disruptions.
8) Time to Resolve (TTR)
This metric measures the time it takes to resolve a service outage or incident. And a bad TTR indicates that your team can quickly and effectively restore service to customers.
9) Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Coverage
It helps when you have to estimate the percentage of infrastructure that is managed as code. Plus, a high IaC coverage indicates that your team is using IaC practices to manage infrastructure efficiently and consistently.
10) Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
It takes the measurements of the average time between service outages or incidents. And a pretty good MTBF indicates that your team is continuously improving the reliability of your product or service.
Using these 10 top DevOps KPIs and metrics is vital as they simply provide a way to measure the performance of your DevOps teams, identify bottlenecks in your processes and technology, improve your processes, measure customer satisfaction, and continuously develop your performance, and technology. By tracking these metrics, you can easily identify areas where your team is excelling and areas that need improvement. And last but not least, make data-driven decisions to advance your DevOps practices. Ultimately, using the top DevOps KPIs and metrics can lend you a hand to deliver value to your customers, enhance your team’s performance, and meet your business objectives.
The most popular tools for tracking DevOps KPIs and metrics are:
1) Datadog: Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform that offers a range of features to track DevOps metrics. It integrates with popular DevOps tools such as GitHub, Jenkins, and Docker, and provides real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities. Datadog also offers customizable dashboards and reporting features to help teams track their KPIs and metrics.
2) New Relic: New Relic is a cloud-based platform that offers monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization tools for modern software environments. It also has features for tracking application performance, infrastructure metrics, and customer experience metrics. Besides, there are integrations with popular DevOps tools that provides custom dashboards and reporting capabilities.
3) Splunk: Splunk is a platform that presents real-time monitoring, analysis, and troubleshooting tools for modern software environments. It provides features for monitoring application performance, infrastructure metrics, and security data. Splunk also offers integrations with popular DevOps tools and provides customizable dashboards and reporting features.
4) Prometheus: Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution that offers features for collecting and storing metrics from software environments. It proffers a powerful query language and flexible data model, which makes it easy to track DevOps metrics. Prometheus also extends integrations with popular DevOps tools and provides custom dashboards and reporting capabilities.
5) And last but not least there is Grafana: Grafana is an open-source platform that offers features for visualizing and analyzing metrics from software environments. It puts forward integrations with popular DevOps tools and provides custom dashboards and reporting capabilities. Grafana also has a wide range of plugins and extensions available, which makes it easy to customize and extend its capabilities.
To put it simply, this list it’s just a drop in the ocean. The choice of the most suitable tool will depend on your specific requirements, budget, and the features you need to track and monitor your DevOps processes effectively.
8 Additional DevOps KPIs and metrics
In order to improve and upgrade your DevOps team’s performance, it is necessary to measure and track KPIs and metrics that are relevant to your organization’s goals and objectives. The additional DevOps KPIs and metrics are the following: technical debt, availability, mean time between releases (MTBR), error rate, mean time to identify (MTTI), failed deployments, release frequency, and security compliance. All of the mentioned KPIs and metrics hold significance and carry weight in the context of improving and upgrading the performance of your DevOps teams. Let’s take a look.
Technical debt
Technical debt refers to the cost of maintaining and fixing code that was built quickly without proper attention to quality or long-term maintainability. By tracking technical debt, you can identify areas where your team needs to spend more time improving code quality and reducing technical debt.
Availability
Availability measures the percentage of time that your application or service is available to users. It is a critical metric for ensuring that your users can access your application or service when they need it.
Mean time between releases (MTBR)
MTBR calculates the time between successful releases of new features or updates. By following MTBR, you can ensure that your team is able to consistently deliver new features and updates to your application or service.
Error rate
Error rate shows you the frequency of errors or bugs in your application or service. By trailing the error rate, you can identify areas where your team needs to spend more time testing and debugging.
Mean time to identify (MTTI)
MTTI estimates the time it takes your team to identify and diagnose a problem when it occurs. Considering MTTI, you can identify areas where your team needs to improve its monitoring and alerting systems.
Failed deployments
Failed deployments show the percentage of deployments that fail or result in errors. By seeking failed deployments, you can identify areas where your team needs to improve its deployment process and reduce the risk of errors or downtime.
Release frequency
Release frequency presents how often your team is able to release new features or updates to your application or service. By reaching release frequency, you can identify areas where your team needs to improve their processes and increase efficiency.
Security compliance
Security compliance measures the level of compliance with security standards and regulations. By tracking security compliance, you can ensure that your application or service is secure and compliant with industry standards and regulations.
For you to find out what metrics you should use in your case, you must constantly align your needs and DevOps practices. Overdoing it is such a waste of time. Sidenote: It’s common to get lost in such a field as DevOps KPIs and metrics, so if you find yourself in this position, we have a piece of advice for you. Contact external consultants (we know we would be honored). Expand your horizon and try reaching out to an external consultant for help. You never know what may really help you, right?
Consider Crunch your trusted DevOps services provider
As a trusted DevOps services provider, Crunch has been helping organizations of all sizes adopt DevOps practices throughout their software development lifecycle and speed up software delivery while reducing potential bugs or downtimes. Our team of experienced DevOps engineers is always focused on KPIs during the project execution, and, in fact, we often suggest a KPI-based approach to adopt for our valuable clients.
The Projects
In our recent project, we built an automated CI/CD pipeline to improve the delivery process for a US-based client. Our technical team had to set up continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, move the core operations to the AWS cloud, simplify error detection before releases, and speed up software deployments.
Results
As an outcome, we helped the client achieve a 73% cost reduction through automation, ultimately leading to a 3-year-long cooperation. In this project, we tracked key metrics such as mean time between releases (MTBR), error rate, deployment frequency, customer satisfaction, and others.
Our DevOps team has extensive experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) deployment, container orchestration, site reliability engineering (SRE) services, continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD) implementation, and more. So, whether you want to implement a DevOps strategy from scratch or refine your existing processes, our DevOps experts will gladly assist and help your business to stay ahead of the curve.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, it is increasingly popular and important for a true leader in DevOps to use additional KPIs and metrics beyond the basic ones. The basic KPIs and metrics that have traditionally been used in DevOps, such as availability, MTBR, error rate, and deployment frequency, are still important and relevant. However, as DevOps practices have matured and evolved, organizations are looking for more comprehensive ways to measure and track their DevOps performance.
Newer and more advanced KPIs and metrics, such as lead time for changes, mean time to recover (MTTR), deployment success rate, customer satisfaction, and cost of downtime, are gaining popularity as they provide a more comprehensive picture of DevOps performance. These KPIs and metrics focus on aspects such as speed, quality, reliability, and customer satisfaction, which are critical for delivering value to the end users and ensuring the success of the DevOps process.
Using a combination of advanced and additional KPIs and metrics really helps organizations identify areas for development, optimize their DevOps process, and drive continuous improvement. Therefore, it is a must for organizations that want to be true leaders in the DevOps environment.
