You sold organizational leadership on DevOps. You transitioned your employees into the DevOps model and now they are collaborating like never before. Now your organization is innovating like never before and going to market at a faster rate than the competition.
While you may think that the buck stops here, you are still far from complete. Implementing change is one thing, but ensuring that it continues to work and runs like a well-oiled machine is another. At the end of the day, you need metrics to measure the success (or lack therefor) in your DevOps program to find out what can be further improved, modified, or extended.
DevOps metrics examine your organization’s deployment, operations, and response to failure and usually fall into three general categories:
- People: As we have discussed in previous blogs, people are the most impacted and difficult to manage in any DevOps process. Whether it is establishing a new culture or promoting a new skillset, your people are the asset that helps any innovation dream come true.
- Process: The people on your teams ultimately manage process, consisting of the continuous maintenance of everything. Process dictates your speed to market, response time to issues, and the effectiveness of your activities.
- Technology: Finally, there are technology metrics, which gather milestones including uptime, failure rate, and the quality of response towards issues your organization may face.
Your mileage will vary on each of these DevOps metrics, but the universal truth is that having metrics tailored to your program is a good start to understand where there is room for improvement. Teams and organizations that are more technical may consider the following industry-accepted metrics for their needs:
- Deployment Frequency
- Change Lead Time
- Change Failure Rate
- Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)
Based on these metrics, DevOps teams should emphasize on the production of frequent and rapid deployments with a low failure and time to recover when there are errors. Though development is far more complicated and involves numerous external factors, these are some of the elements to keep in consideration.
Finally, having the right tools to measure your DevOps activities is key to having the right numbers and obtaining accurate return on investment. Some of the tools you are already using may have these metrics already built in for your convenience, while others may require an add-on to gain additional visibility.
Good luck!
Measure Your DevOps
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