Understanding Platform Engineering Metrics for Improved Team Performance

Did you know that organizations running platform engineering teams experience an overall organizational performance boost of 6% (2024 DORA Report)? As platform engineering matures from an emerging trend to an established practice, one question becomes increasingly important: how do we measure success?

For engineering leaders looking to evaluate their platform investments, metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) provide essential insights into what's working — and what isn't. But with platform engineering still evolving, many teams struggle to identify which metrics actually matter.

Whether you're just starting your platform engineering journey or looking to optimize an existing platform, this guide will help you:

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

Let's dive into how you can measure platform engineering success in ways that drive real organizational value.

Sections:

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Before jumping into the metrics, let’s first define a platform. Since this is a rapidly evolving space, we like to borrow the definition from DORA:

"Platform is a set of capabilities that is shared across multiple applications or services. The platform's goal is to improve the efficiency and productivity of software delivery. A company may have multiple overlapping platforms, but we refer to these overall as 'the platform.' A platform engineering team is not required.

We view platform engineering as the next evolution of DevOps, which is a broader set of practices in pursuit of improving software delivery performance.

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Before jumping into metrics, it’s important to understand the key goals platform engineering is seeking to achieve. According to the Puppet 2024 State of DevOps Survey, the top 3 goals are to:

1. Increase speed of product delivery
2. Improve security and compliance
3. Support Infrastructure

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Platform engineering ultimately builds on DevOps principles to help development teams ship better software faster. It creates an environment where developers can work securely and efficiently through self-service capabilities – all within a properly governed framework.

But how do we know if these platforms are actually delivering value? That's where platform engineering metrics come in.

Platform engineering metrics are measurable indicators used to assess the performance, efficiency, and reliability of platform operations. These metrics provide teams with actionable insights to improve the developer experience and align technical efforts with business objectives.

DORA Metrics

DORA metrics are key performance indicators that measure software delivery performance and  link to organizational performance, which provide an indicator of the platform engineering success.

DORA has evolved to be an accepted industry benchmark for DevOps efforts, as it is based on research spanning over 39,000 professionals across organizations of all sizes and industries. These metrics have proven to be reliable predictors of organizational performance. 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 and so this metric tends to receive less focus.

DORA Research suggests that teams deploying platform engineering teams should see an ~6% improvement in organizational performance against these metrics. Below are the latest benchmarks from the 2024 DORA report:

A nuanced finding in the 2024 DORA report was also that platform engineering teams were linked to an 8% drop in throughput and 14% drop in change stability.

Other Platform Engineering Metrics

While DORA metrics are useful for measuring throughput and stability, there are other metrics to measure specifically platform engineering which may not be captured.

According to Puppet research, here are other metrics to also consider around security and compliance:

• Incident Volume — The number of platform incidents over time. A downward trend in incidents doesn't just mean better stability — it indicates your platform is effectively supporting development teams to ship more reliable code.
• Resolution Speed — Speed by which your team can fix a vulnerability after it is identified, without the need to audit and enforce compliance manually.

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Build a trust-based environment with open communication

Building high-performing engineering teams requires more than technical excellence, it requires trust. Platform engineers collaborate closely with DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to create workflows that actually work. Try these strategies to create an environment where teams can spot and eliminate bottlenecks before they slow down development:

• Encourage open communication: Effective collaboration starts with psychological safety - where team members feel confident sharing ideas and raising concerns. When teams have this foundation, they catch potential issues earlier and build stronger working relationships that lead to better outcomes.
• Recognize and reward collaboration: Recognition plays a key role in sustaining collaborative cultures. According to Forbes, teams that celebrate knowledge sharing and supportive behaviors see these practices multiply across their organization. This creates a positive cycle where collaboration becomes part of the team's DNA.

Build a platform that puts engineers first

Great platform engineering starts with understanding who you're building for. When developers have the right tools and workflows, they can focus on what they do best - creating valuable features for users. Similarly, platform teams can also adopt a user-centric mindset -- where their users are internal developers. Here's how to build a developer-centric platform:

• Eliminate toil through standardization: Toil can be thought of as the repetitive, predictable, constant stream of tasks related to maintaining a service. By giving developers a consistent, reliable foundation to build on teams can reduce toil. When basic infrastructure and security are handled by the platform, teams spend less time wrestling with configuration and more time shipping features that matter.
• Measure what matters: Track how much time your platform saves developers from repetitive tasks. The most successful platforms dramatically reduce the cognitive load of infrastructure management, letting developers stay focused on business problems.

Create the one-stop shop

Today's developers navigate a complex landscape of tools and technologies. A well-designed Internal Developer Platform (IDP) brings everything together in one place, making development smoother and more efficient. Here's what makes an IDP truly valuable:

• Create self-service experiences: Empower developers to move fast safely. A well-designed platform provides guardrails rather than gates, letting teams access what they need when they need it - without compromising on security or scalability.
• Integrate intelligently: Through thoughtful extensibility, teams can adapt their platform to meet evolving business needs - whether that's adding new tools, integrating custom services, or refining existing workflows. On top of source code management tools like Bitbucket and GitHub, other integrations include: observability tools, DevSecOps, and Issue tracking.

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To effectively track and optimize platform engineering metrics, teams can rely on Multitudes, an engineering insights platform designed for sustainable delivery.

Multitudes integrates seamlessly with tools like GitHub and Jira, offering a comprehensive view of your platform’s technical performance, operational health, and team collaboration.

With Multitudes, you can:

• Monitor all critical platform engineering metrics in one centralized dashboard
• Uncover patterns in your metrics that influence delivery speed and quality
• Measure the impact of collaboration on platform performance and developer productivity

By leveraging Multitudes, platform teams can spend less time on data collection and more on using actionable insights to improve platform performance

Our clients ship 25% faster while maintaining code quality and team wellbeing.

Ready to improve your platform engineering metrics?

Try Multitudes today!