DevOps has become the go-to standard for developing software. This is due to its potential of developing high-quality software at faster rates and ensuring that customer requirements are met steadfast. DevOps standards have also been significant in flawlessly combining the functions of development and operations teams as a particular entity instead of two diverse silos. To use the numerous benefits that it can bring to the software development process, it is essential to treat DevOps as a journey and not a destination unto itself. The essentially means collecting feedback, creating benchmark and continually measuring results to track progress. Here comes the tracking metrics into focus. Let us see the top 11 devops metrics and kpi to track for measuring devops.
Know the details of DevOps at- What is Devops? | The complete guide to DevOps (With Examples)
This KPI indicates how frequently new capabilities and features are rolled out. Deployment frequency must be tracked and measured on weekly or daily basis. Organizations that are scaling up their DevOps journey to improve efficiency mostly prefer to track this metric on a daily basis. The deployment frequency should either remain consistent or keep a little but consistent upward trajectory. Any sudden dip in deployment frequency shows that DevOps processes are being obstructed by bottlenecks in the workflow. Whereas, a high frequency of deployments is considered healthy, a high failure rate or spike in deployment time is seen as a sign of issues that should be resolved.
How long does it take to deploy once they’ve been approved? Generally, deployments can occur with greater frequency if they’re quick to implement. Dramatic increases in deployment time warrant further investigation, particularly if they are accompanied by reduced deployment volume. Whereas, short deployment time is necessary, it shouldn’t come at the cost of accuracy. Error rates that are increased may suggest that deployments occur very rapidly.
Deployments that has performance issues or leading to subpar customer experience is recognized as a failed deployment. Hence, tracking the rate or percentage of such deployments is an important metric of assessing DevOps success. Here the expectation is that teams will be able to build high-quality products from the beginning of a project, as the responsibility of keeping up the highest quality standards rests with the whole team and not simply the QA department. This should imply that there are no failed deployments at all. However, that is not a realistic expectation. Tracking of failed deployment percentages can help to take a stock of ground realities and prepare a plan to counter roadblocks. This pushes you nearer to the 0 failed deployment rate. However long your failure rate is below 5%, your DevOps processes can be viewed as robust. Failed deployment rate of 10% or more, indicates a need for overhauling the processes.
It refers to the extent to which releases lead to unexpected outages or other unplanned failures. Low change failure rate indicates that deployments occur rapidly and regularly. On the other hand, a high change failure rate shows poor application stability, which can lead to negative end-user outcomes.
Low failed deployment rate doesn’t mean that your processes are free from issues. Time to detection is a KPI that helps you to understand whether your response time and application monitoring processes are functioning optimally. DevOps teams should strive to limit the time between the rise of an issue and its detection and remedy. Also, the closer your time to detection is to zero, the more robust your DevOps processes. This can’t be achieved without implementing appropriate protocols and establishing communication channels between team members.
Lead time estimates what amount of time it requires for a change to happen. This metric may be tracked beginning with idea initiation and continuing through deployment and production. Also, this metric offers valuable insight into the efficiency of entire development process. This also shows that the current ability to meet the user base’s evolving needs. Long need times suggest harmful bottlenecks, while short lead times indicates harmful bottlenecks, short lead times indicate that feedback is addressed promptly.
Every software deployment runs the risk of sparking new issues. These probably won’t be found until acceptance testing is finished. More terrible yet, they could be found by the end user. Issues are a natural part of the development process and should be planned for accordingly. Defect escape rate shows this reality by acknowledging those issues will arise and they should be discovered as early as possible. This metric tracks how often issues are uncovered in pre-production versus in the production process. This can provide an important check of the all-encompassing quality of software releases.
Error rate tracking is important for your app. These are the indicators of quality problems and uptime related issues. Good exception handling best practices are critical for software.
Production issues- Detect issues with database connections, query timeouts and so on
Bugs- Identify new exceptions being thrown in your code after deployment
It is used to track the number codes your team commits to the software before it is ready to be deployed. This offers an insight into code quality and deployment velocity. Devops team defines the acceptable range for code commits on a case-on-case basis. However long the code committed rate is within this range, there is no reason for concern. But, many commits are an indicator of poor quality or lack of clear direction in the development process. Whereas, less commits refers to a non-productive, exhausted team. Tracking of this metric helps to maintain development quality and velocity and productivity with team satisfaction.
This metric provides a wide overview of app deployment. It tracks the entire process, from ideation to user feedback. Short cycles are mostly preferable, but not at the expense of detecting defects or abiding by SLAs.
For businesses it is important to keep minimum failures and recover them rapidly. It helps to track how long it takes to recover from failures. Typically it is measured in hours and may refer to business hours not clock hours. Having good app monitoring tools are important to rapidly identify issues and quickly deploy the fix is important to reduce MTTR.
Implementing DevOps isn’t easy, it involves a great deal of strategic, technical and business decisions, but whenever used effectively, it improves the organization in terms of effectiveness and revenue. At Solace, we use mobile DevOps development to help our clients to reduce time-to-market new features while at the same time catching new market opportunities.