DORA Metrics

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Overview

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics are four key metrics used to indicate the velocity and stability of software development.

Deployment Frequency: How often an organization successfully releases to production.
Lead Time for Changes: The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production.
Change Failure Rate: The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.
Time to Restore Service: How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production.

Defining and tracking DORA metrics can help you identify areas of improvement for your team or organization’s speed and quality of software delivery.

Set up DORA Metrics

The four DORA Metrics are calculated based on two types of events:

Deployment events: Indicate that a new deployment has occurred for a service in a specific environment. Deployment events are used to compute Deployment Frequency, Change Lead Time, and Change Failure Rate.
Incident events: Indicate that a new issue has occurred for a service in a specific environment. Incident events are used to compute Change Failure Rate and Mean Time to Restore.

Set up DORA Metrics in Datadog:

Send Deployment Events

Send Incident Events

Use DORA Metrics

You can access and visualize your DORA metrics and filter them by team, service, repository, environment, and time period on the DORA Metrics page.

Use the information on this page to identify improvements or regressions for each metric, visualize changes, and compare trends over time. DORA metrics can be exported to dashboards or notebooks and be alerted on using metric monitors.

The metrics can also be queried with the Query timeseries points and Query timeseries data across multiple products API endpoints.

The metrics provided by DORA Metrics are:

Metric	Type	Description
`dora.deployments.count`	count	Used for Deployment Frequency.
`dora.change_lead_time`	distribution	Contains the age in `seconds` of the git commits at the time of deployment.
`dora.incidents_impact`	count	Tracks the services or teams impacted by incidents. Used for Change Failure Rate with the formula `dora.incidents_impact / dora.deployments.count`. A big time rollup of at least 1 week is recommended to account for time difference between deployments and when the impact starts.
`dora.time_to_restore`	distribution	Contains the time in `seconds` between the incident’s `started_at` and `finished_at`.

All the metrics contain the following tags when available:

service
team
env
repository_id

Note: The severity tag is available for the dora.incidents_impact and dora.time_to_restore metrics, if provided through the API.

Deployment and incident events

DORA Metrics also provides individual deployment, incident, and incident_finished events in Event Management with source:software_delivery_insights.

The events can be queried and visualized with the Events Explorer.

Limitations

Deployment and incident events must be sent as soon as possible. Events for which the finished_at timestamp is 1 hour older than the current time are not accepted.
Deployments or incidents of the same service cannot occur at the same second.