Understanding DevOps Metrics to Improve Engineering Performance

According to the 2024 DORA report, "elite" engineering teams—those in the top 19% of software delivery performance—deploy on demand (often multiple times per day), recover from failed deployments in less than an hour, and maintain a 5% change failure rate or lower.

For engineering leaders looking to evaluate their DevOps initiatives, metrics provide insights into what's working — and what isn't. But with DevOps practices constantly evolving, many teams struggle to identify which metrics actually matter.

Research shows there are now 700-800 different product metrics being used across the industry, with teams often creating their own custom measures. This abundance of metrics has led to some confusion about their purpose.

Whether you're just starting your DevOps journey or looking to optimize existing practices, this guide will help you:

Understand the key metrics that indicate DevOps success
Compare your performance against industry benchmarks
Make data-driven decisions about your DevOps strategy

Let's explore how you can measure DevOps success in ways that drive real organizational value.

Sections:

1. What is DevOps?
2. What are the best DevOps Metrics?
3. What are critical factors to DevOps success
4. Improve your DevOps with Multitudes

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1. What is DevOps?

DevOps represents a fundamental shift in how software teams collaborate—bringing together development and operations. At its heart, DevOps brings together "Development" and "Operations" in a transformative shift in how teams work together.

The DevOps movement emerged in 2007-8 to address a challenge: the disconnect between software development and operations teams. To understand this dynamic, consider John Willis's restaurant analogy:

Development teams are like chefs, creating new dishes in the kitchen
Operations teams are like servers, delivering these creations to customers

When kitchen and serving staff don't communicate effectively, restaurants struggle. Similarly, software delivery suffers when development and operations work in isolation—creating what was once the biggest bottleneck in software delivery.

While the exact origins of DevOps practices are difficult to pinpoint, we can look to early pioneers like Netflix. In 2008, after experiencing a devastating three-day outage from database corruption, Netflix transformed their approach to software delivery. They developed innovative practices like their famous "chaos monkey"—a tool that deliberately introduces failures in production systems to test resilience.

This exemplifies their broader "chaos engineering" philosophy, which continues to influence DevOps practices today. Several years later, researchers began studying what exceptional DevOps performance looks like and began the DevOps Research Assessment program (DORA).

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2. What are the best DevOps Metrics?

The key to successful DevOps implementation lies in measuring the right things.

According to the DORA research program, which has studied over 36,000 professionals across organizations of all sizes, there are several key metrics that reliably predict organizational performance.

DORA Metrics: The Industry Standard

Over time, these metrics have evolved, leading to updates and the introduction of a fifth metric in 2024:

Change Lead Time: The time it takes to go from first commit to code successfully running in production.
Deployment Frequency: How often an organization deploys code to production or releases it to end users.
Failed Deployment Recovery Time (Formerly Mean Time to Recovery): The time it takes to restore service when a deployment causes an outage or service failure in production (whereas previously Mean Time to Recovery also included uncontrollable failure events such as an earthquake disrupting service).
Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that result in degraded service or require remediation (e.g., that lead to service impairment or outage, and require a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, or patch).
Rework rate: This fifth metric was introduced later in 2024, and together with Change Failure Rate provide an indicator of software delivery stability. Since it's a newer addition, there aren’t yet established quantifiable benchmarks..

Below are the latest benchmarks from the 2024 DORA report:

Additional DevOps Metrics to Consider

There are endless debates across the internet about what metrics to use. At Multitudes, our philosophy towards metrics are:

Use research-backed DORA metrics because they bring more evidence of measuring the right things
Look at a multitude of metrics – one or two alone won’t be a true reflection of the trade-offs we have to make
Consider metrics as "conversation starters" rather than a ground truth.
Don’t agonize about choosing perfect metrics – focus instead on building trust, pick a few good key metrics, and then leave plenty of opportunity for team feedback and changes along the way

Aside from DORA, you can also explore the SPACE (Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, and Efficiency) and the Developer Experience (DevEx) frameworks.

You can read more about what we measure and why here.

SPACE Metrics

Developer Experience Metrics

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3. What are critical factors to DevOps success

A systematic literature review by Azad et al. was conducted to identify what truly drives DevOps success. From over 38 primary studies, there were 100 different factors identified which were boiled down to the 10 most important ones:

Success Factor	Definition
1. Performance Engineering	Performance engineering integrates optimization tools and processes directly into development workflows to ensure software runs efficiently at every step.
2. Integration	Integration connects different systems, processes, and tools into one cohesive workflow that enables seamless development.
3. Build and Test Automation	Build and test automation automatically creates and verifies software, removing repetitive tasks so teams can focus on innovation while improving delivery speed.
4. Infrastructure	Infrastructure refers to the essential foundation of hardware, software, and resources needed to build, deploy, and run systems continuously.
5. DevOps as a Service	DevOps as a service provides teams with a ready-to-use platform of tools and practices that streamline development and deployment workflows, often using microservices for rapid updates.
6. Collaboration and Communication	Communication and collaboration involve open exchange of ideas, feedback, and cooperative effort between team members working toward shared goals.
7. Organizational Hierarchy	Organizational hierarchy refers to the structure of authority and leadership that guides decision-making, communication, and operational efficiency within a company.
8. Strategic Planning	Strategic planning aligns resources, processes, and business objectives to create a clear roadmap for long-term success.
9. Team Dynamics	Team dynamics refer to the patterns of interaction, trust, and collaboration that determine how effectively team members work together.
10. Culture	Culture refers to the shared values, behaviors, and understanding that shape how people work together and adapt to change.

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It was found that DevOps success isn't limited by company size or industry — these principles work whether you're a startup or an enterprise. What matters most is creating an environment where teams can break down traditional barriers and work together effectively.

The key success factors we've identified apply broadly across:

Private and public sector organizations
Companies of different sizes and industries
Teams at various stages of DevOps maturity

At its heart, DevOps is about transforming company culture. It's not just about tools or processes - it's about bringing teams together through better coordination and communication, all aligned toward clear, shared objectives.

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