DEV Community

Jignesh Solanki
Jignesh Solanki

Posted on

5 Key Metrics to Measure DevOps Performance

Believe it or not, Cloud is the future of the IT industry. According to a survey report published by the puppet, in 2021, 90% of enterprises believe in cloud adoption and automation while 65% of medium-sized organizations are reported to be using the public cloud. Despite such a huge percentage of companies taking interest in the cloud, only 20% of them can use the cloud to its full potential. The reason is cloud implementation challenges. According to a survey, the top three reasons for cloud implementation failures are:

  • lack of understanding of cloud security and compliance (indicated by 56% of respondents)
  • lack of clearly-identified business objectives for migrating to the cloud (55%)
  • lack of planning (42%)

Not having the right metrics is also associated with Devop’s failure. DevOps metrics help in visualizing objectives and making them easier to understand. Such metrics are crucial for collecting, analyzing, and measuring cloud performance for better alignment with business goals and KPIs for continuous improvement. In this blog, we are going to discuss a few crucial DevOps metrics.

5 types of DevOps Metrics

1. Deployment Frequency

According to a survey conducted by Atlassian, 75% of organizations consider Deployment Frequency a core metric for effective DevOps practices. As the name suggests, Deployment frequency is associated with the number of deployments over a certain period As we know not all deployments are pushed to production, as such, the deployment frequency metric is used for the evaluation of the technical performance of the deployment pipeline. The metric gives details associated with failed deployments due to deployment errors. Such errors if not rectified in time can affect overall customer satisfaction.

2. Lead Time

The time it takes to implement, test, and deliver the code is known as lead time. The primary goal here is to increase the speed of deployment through automating the process of optimization, integration, or testing processes. This metric is important to figure out how responsive your organization is towards its end-users needs.

3. Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)

Not every deployment is picture-perfect. Sometimes, things go wrong with the production. In such an event, the deployment is sent back to service. MTTR or mean time to recover is the time taken to go back to service after a production failure. The point to be noted here is MTTR doesn’t measure the time it takes to fix a build but the responsiveness of the DevOps team during such an unpleasant situation. A decrease in MTTR increases in overall user experience.

4. Change Failure Rate

Also known as change failure percentage, it is the ratio between successful and unsuccessful changes. Failure comprises any change that results in service degradation, rollback, a fix-forward, a patch, or a hotfix. This metric doesn’t demand complete omission of failure. Failure sometimes leads to new insights and fixes. This specific metric helps DevOps teams to measure and track their progress. The change failure rate should gradually decrease over time as the DevOps team develops their experience and efficiency in handling situations.

5. Customer Ticket Volume

For organizations that hold high values for end-user satisfaction, this is the metric to follow. No matter how hard you try, few bugs and errors often bypass the testing phase. Those are faced by the end-users. The number of tickets raised by the end-users that are marked as problems or bugs is an important indicator of your application’s reliability. Moving ahead, you would want customer ticket volume to be less to have high-end user satisfaction.

Conclusion

DevOps deliver huge benefits to organizations. They contribute towards business value through the continuous delivery of products and services. But they are often considered complex to implement.

Using proper DevOps metrics, one can monitor the performance of DevOps teams and know whether their current DevOps strategy is paying off. In this blog, we discussed 5 of the crucial DevOps metrics that are worth monitoring.

Top comments (0)