This article will tell you more about the value that DevOps offers businesses. We will present the 5 most important KPIs that you can use to measure the success of DevOps in your company. If you could increase revenue and thus company value by implementing a new process, would you do it? Most entrepreneurs and executives would answer with a resounding "Yes" without hesitation. Yet, such a process has already evolved over the last decade: DevOps, which enables software companies to continuously iterate and deliver faster. However, you first need to find a way to measure this added value to demonstrate whether the DevOps implementation has been successful.
What is DevOps and why is it important?
To define DevOps, areas related to company culture, methods, and tools must be examined. One explanation could be: DevOps is a combination of mindsets, practices, and tools that enable companies to deliver applications and services faster and more easily. This allows for the further development and improvement of products in less time than in companies that rely on traditional processes for software development and infrastructure management. (Source:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) websiteIn older work models, a logical separation between development and operations is usually deliberately maintained. Tasks are passed back and forth across this boundary between teams, resulting in a significant loss of context and no knowledge transfer. However, as software projects become increasingly complex and market demand requires faster iterations, these models cannot scale. DevOps enables faster end-to-end software development. Features reach the customer more quickly, thus increasing value and flexibility. To determine whether you are successfully implementing DevOps, you should measure the following KPIs.
Identify and measure KPIs
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to measure the success of a team or initiative. Generally, KPIs must be aligned with a specific goal, be measurable, and fit within a timeframe. In the case of DevOps, KPIs should provide quantifiable data on goals such as deployment speed and application performance. Below, we present the five most important points and how they can be integrated into reporting.
1. Provisioning frequency If you could only choose a single performance metric to evaluate your DevOps processes, it should be deployment frequency. If the primary goal of DevOps is to increase the speed of development and deployment, then the most important success metric is software delivery frequency. Once teams adopt DevOps, frequency should increase, with any decrease indicating a bottleneck in the process. To easily measure deployment frequency, you can set up a webhook in the final stage of your CI/CD pipeline or deployment tool. Each successful delivery should trigger the webhook and increase the deployment count. In highly complex deployment environments, it may be necessary to granularize the metric, for example, by region or by customer.
2. Lead time for changes In a successful DevOps organization, the rapid flow of feedback between IT operations and development enables changes to be implemented quickly, accurately, and efficiently. New features, patches, bug fixes, and security measures should be completed from creation to delivery with minimal lead time, with longer lead times again indicating a bottleneck. To effectively measure change lead time, you need to implement at least two other methods from DevOps and Agile:
- A shared work backlog for Dev and Ops that transparently reveals the status of all work packages, for example using systems like Azure or Jira.
- Providing individual work packages and features to ensure that deliveries contain isolated small changes that can be rolled back if necessary.
The next step is to link each change directly to a ticket or work package and assign it an ID. The delivery system (e.g., a CI/CD pipeline) reads this ID and can use webhooks to automatically close the ticket for each successfully delivered change. Finally, to determine the lead time for changes, simply measure the total time elapsed between opening and closing the tickets.
3. Defect volume and defect escape rate (defect budget) Another important metric is the number of defects. The defect escape rate (DER) is the ratio of defects found by users in production to the bugs detected by quality assurance (QA) testing in the test environment. This metric provides insights into the quality of your software deployments and the effectiveness of your QA team's test coverage. Keep in mind that striving for 100% defect-free operation can be counterproductive. For example, it can lead to hesitancy in making changes and a backlog in delivering important feature upgrades. We recommend allowing more flexibility in your SLAs to work with reasonable defect budgets.
4. Service Level Agreements A Service Level Agreement (SLA) can be "soft," for example, an idealized goal. However, it often defines a legally binding contractual obligation to maintain a certain level of application availability over a specific period. All parties involved should jointly determine precisely what constitutes uptime and downtime and then agree on an effective measurement method.
5. Application performance Most web-based applications measure performance using metrics such as TTFB (Time to First Byte), error rates, and response times. These are all easily quantifiable and direct indicators of the user experience an application or service provides, and details about application performance may also be included in the SLAs discussed earlier.
KPI reporting
With a refined list of KPIs, a solid Service Level Agreement, and a monitoring infrastructure, you have the data you need to determine if DevOps is delivering on its promises. However, technical and non-technical stakeholders across the organization are likely interested in the metrics, and the question remains: how can you present this data effectively? Fortunately, there's a rich ecosystem of tools available for reporting and visualizing KPI status. A key objective in DevOps is to make work "visible." While it may be obvious that teams are working, the challenge lies in determining the contextual significance and overall status of work packages. Methodologies from the agile world, such as Kanban or user stories, have proven to be effective tools for this.
Dashboard solutions
Several dashboard solutions are available to enhance the quantification of KPI metrics. Tools like Datadog, Grafana, and Tableau offer comprehensive capabilities for visualizing a wide range of business and technical performance metrics. Most of these solutions are already integrated with other SaaS platforms, tools, and APIs. For KPIs related to SLAs and application performance, you should collect the necessary data directly from production systems. You can also create visualizations of change lead times and deployment speeds. This allows you to consolidate all the data into user-friendly dashboards and share them with relevant stakeholders.
Summary: Key takeaways about intuitive eating
Practice has already demonstrated the potential of DevOps and its added value for businesses. However, you first need to make that added value measurable. You should also ensure that all stakeholders can easily identify and understand the driving factors. For DevOps to have a chance of success, both technical and non-technical teams must be coordinated. Non-technical stakeholders need to get involved and collaborate with software teams and vendors to create meaningful, realistic KPIs and SLAs. Technical teams need to design systems and processes that optimize software delivery and provide robust tools for communicating the added value that DevOps brings to the business.
