Operational Metrics

Spotting The Next Hit

The fear of phone calls haunts my sleep away. I have to keep my faith with my DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams to tell me the facilities are ok.

We capture some attributes in out DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment). I ensure we have the means to measure our attributes.

Capturing Agility

Deployment Frequency

This metric measures how often a team deploys code modules to production. Higher frequency indicates better performance as it means that the team can deliver changes and features more rapidly.

1. Deploy smaller releases frequently to minimize risk. 
2. Frequent deployments 
  2.1. provide valuable user feedback for improving software efficiently.
  2.2. support agile development by enabling quick adaptation to market changes and facilitating continuous learning for faster enhancements.
  2.3. promote collaboration between teams, leading to better outcomes and more successful projects.

Lead Time for Changes

It indicates the amount of time from the initiation of a code change until it’s delivered to production. Shorter lead times mean faster delivery and response to business needs. Yet, note that faster Lead Time to Change is not correlated with better code quality output.

1. Shorter lead times enable experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement, empowering organizations to stay competitive in dynamic environments.
2. Reducing lead time demands collaborative teamwork, breaking silos, fostering shared ownership, and improving communication, coordination, and efficiency.

Capturing Resilience and Stability

Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)

This metric measures the time to recover a system or service after an incident, outage or failure in production. Lower times indicate more efficient incident response processes. This is key to minimizing downtime.

Even if you do not have service level agreements (SLAs) that are vital for upholding client trust and fulfilling contractual commitments, have one benchmarked in mind for operational quality assurance.