If you really care about your goals for DevOps managed services and you are ready to do anything to reach them, you must first be able to choose the right metrics. Since your organization is following the DevOps methodology, and you have integrated operations, development, and QA, it is important to know if it’s working at all. It is always easier to start but harder to keep alive. To help you out in such circumstances, metrics are there for the rescue.
You require metrics not just as a way to evaluate the success or slow performance of your DevOps program, but to find the way to enhance, modify, or extend it. Metrics are the eyes to your business that provide you a holistic point of view. You can know where you are, where you’re going, where you can go, and how to get there. This article is not about analytics tools to measure the activities in the pipeline, but measuring the pipeline itself.
DevOps metrics measure things like
- Speed of development
- Speed of deployment
- Customer response
- Frequency of deployments
- Failures
- Repair request volume
- Repair time
- Rate of change in these indicators
Many times, DevOps metrics fall into three general types
- People – People are a central part of any DevOps process. People-oriented metrics evaluate such things- capability, turnover, and response time. People are the hardest element of any element and their impact is hard to notice at times.
- Process- DevOps is all about process in some ways. There is a continuous suite of interwoven processes that has the continual deployment/operations/support cycle. However, there are metrics with clearer process-oriented approach and involving continuous delivery, response, and repair.
- Technology – Technology metrics also has important role in DevOps and can be used for measuring such things as uptime and failure rate.
Determine the DevOps challenges
Prior figuring out the best DevOps metrics to track for your business, it is important for you to detect what challenges your company has and what issues you are trying to address with metrics.
Here we got a list of DevOps metrics that really work!
You can think about these DevOps metrics while thinking of the revenue-
1. Speed metrics
It’s hard to anticipate everything that is responsible for delayed work. Uncertainty in a business increases with every interruption from unplanned and invisible work. When people complain about delay work, you know that the time has come to measure how long things actually take. Here’s how speed metrics comes in the row.
Speed metric allows you to see through the percentiles and probabilities and get answers of the questions like – “what is the probability of delivering a new feature in a month?”
2. Throughput metric
Multiple projects are being handled by the management staff at the same time, getting people attention and resources is harder. The priorities set by team A and team B are totally different. When priorities are unclear, people assign excess of work for themselves, which increases flow time, resulting delayed project throughout the value stream. A throughput metric is intended to reveal just how much work is getting done by the teams.
3. Work type allocation metric
When the teams focus on more feature type work, the technical debt gets increased over time. Critical non-functional requirements are ignored. Important work turns out as urgent work as the neglected work change into an emergency, for instance a security breach. By bringing visibility to work type allocations, things can be sorted out.
Flow distribution through categorizing business value can be managed into four baskets
- Features
- Risks
- Defects
- Debt
4. WIP metric
When people want to get busy all the time, utilization levels increase and teams become overwhelmed with excess WIP or work in progress. People already give their 100% to the work and don’t have enough capacity to handle unplanned or urgent requirements without dropping other urgent work. Work in progress is the factor that affects the duration of project. In case the company teams are drowning in excessive work, it’s time to use WIP metric.
Flow load measures every partially done work in a value stream.
5. Efficiency metric
There are more tools available than before. The fact is everybody is working in their tool and each team owns a different tool. People have their own views of the value stream as per the tools they are using. A company is doing well if its flow efficiency is more than 15%.
To deliver customer value at faster speed, you must enable the fast, smooth, and predictable work flow across the value stream.
These five top metrics decide DevOps success. You can read about them in more details online. There are many articles published explaining the working of each DevOps metric. If you have any doubt or query for metric use, ask professional assistance in your area.