<p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">One consistent thing in any field of work is that you must show proof of work. Whether you're in a technical role like software development or a managerial role like product management, you'll have to keep track of your progress and show the numbers for it. This is where Key Performance Indicators and Metrics come in to save the day.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">In DevOps, KPIs and metrics play a crucial role in gauging the success of your DevOps practices, tools, and pipelines. KPIs also provide helpful insights into the performance of different teams in the DevOps cycle. </span></p><h2 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">What is the KPI for DevOps?</span></h2><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">KPIs or Metrics for DevOps are indicators and data points that quantify your DevOps cycle in terms of different elements. Not only do these metrics help you measure the success of your practices, but they also come in handy for monitoring and comparing tools and practices. These quantitative assessment tools can be a game-changer for you, as they can help immensely improve product cycle and quality delivery.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">DevOps has different KPIs and metrics that focus on the various aspects of DevOps philosophy. The common types of metrics include efficiency metrics, quality metrics, velocity metrics, and collaboration metrics. Each metric type has its standards and evaluates various aspects of the same cycle.</span></p><h3 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Why are DevOps Metrics and KPIs Necessary?</span></h3><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">The main reason metrics and KPIs are necessary for DevOps is that they let you handle the flow of the cycle. By understanding the workflow better, teams can determine potential improvements and assign tasks accordingly. </span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">KPIs also help track individual and team assessments, which will later assist in evaluating performance. This can be useful for higher team associates to assess individuals' performance and provide feedback accordingly.</span></p><h2 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Top 8 KPIs For DevOps For Your Team</span></h2><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">KPIs for DevOps means you will gain insights about every process and practice that is part of the DevOps cycle. Here are some of the crucial DevOps metrics and KPIs that can be useful to evaluate the success levels of your DevOps culture.</span></p><h4 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Cycle Time</span></h4><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Cycle time refers to the overall time taken from coding to the release of the application. Basically, it measures the entire time from work started to work released. While cycle time is a large unit to measure, it can be broken down into four phases for convenience - coding, pickup, review, and deployment. Teams with shorter cycle times release products more often and more quickly.</span></p><h4 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Deployment Frequency</span></h4><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">As the name suggests, deployment frequency is all about how often a team can release successful products. The deployment frequency is based on a wide range of factors as it only measures the final act of deployment. Teams with higher deployment frequency have better working CI/CD pipelines and fewer interruptions in the overall cycle. </span></p><h4 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Change Volume</span></h4><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Change volume focuses on code - this metric is all about the amount of code that makes it to production per every deployment. By tracking this, you can evaluate the changes the code undergoes before every deployment. This metric is often associated with deployment frequency as they affect each other. Too high of a change volume can be negative feedback about the narrowing down of the code. </span></p><h4 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Mean Time to Detection to Recovery</span></h4><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Mean time to detection refers to the time it takes to identify an issue with the production. It is a quantifier that judges how your organization faces failure during production and how it recovers. Mean time to recovery counts the total time taken to recognize the issue and recover from the failure. This is a popular metric, and it should always be low in order for the healthy functioning of the team as well as the DevOps cycle.</span></p><h4 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Service Level Agreements (SLAs)</span></h4><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">DevOps SLA refers to the agreement between a service provider and the client regarding features like response time, service availability, and resolution time. It is crucial that your DevOps cycle aligns with SLA compliance, or it can hinder the workflow in later stages. Only when the SLA demands are met does it mean that the organization and its services are functioning effectively.</span></p><h4 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Change Failure Rate (CFR)</span></h4><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">CFR refers to the percentage of failed deployments to production. The deployment failure can be caused by multiple issues, including errors in code and unexpected outages. While it is impossible to achieve a zero CFR, efficient teams are expected to maintain rates below 15%. A low CFR means your DevOps teams are working extremely well.</span></p><h4 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Customer feedback</span></h4><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Customer feedback metrics can go either way, as they reflect the relationship between your product and the customer. This is also one of the most crucial metrics that help measure the success and receptivity of your software and act on it. Customer feedback is also a reliable feedback metric because this is raw feedback and can be used for improving product cycles.</span></p><h4 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Unplanned Work Rate</span></h4><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Be it any business cycle, there is always unplanned work, especially in a working environment like DevOps. The unplanned work rate refers to the amount of time your team has spent on unexpected efforts. Ideally, the unexpected work rate should not exceed 25 percent - a high rate of unexpected work means that too much time is being spent on errors in the workflow. This metric is also compared with the rework rate, a metric that is related to working on feedback.</span></p><h2 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">CLI commands related to DevOps KPIs</span></h2><figure class="table"><table><thead><tr><th><strong>Command</strong></th><th><strong>Description</strong></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><pre><code class="language-plaintext">git log --since="last month"</code></pre></td><td>Check the number of commits or deployments done in the last month (Deployment Frequency).</td></tr><tr><td><pre><code class="language-plaintext">git diff HEAD~1 --stat</code></pre></td><td>Compare the last commit with the previous one to see changes (Lead Time for Changes).</td></tr><tr><td><pre><code class="language-plaintext">kubectl get pods --all-namespaces</code></pre></td><td>Monitor the status of all pods in Kubernetes (Mean Time to Recovery).</td></tr><tr><td><pre><code class="language-plaintext">aws cloudwatch get-metric-data</code></pre></td><td>Fetch metrics data for monitoring CI/CD pipeline performance (Automation Coverage).</td></tr><tr><td><pre><code class="language-plaintext">coverage run -m unittest discover</code></pre></td><td>Run tests and calculate test coverage (Test Coverage).</td></tr></tbody></table></figure><h2 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">The Bottom Line</span></h2><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">In </span><a href="https://devopsden.io/article/what-is-devops"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">DevOps</span></a><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">, KPIs and metrics can be very helpful in identifying errors in the workflow and rectifying them quickly. Metrics can also be used to gather feedback about individual and team efforts. Some of the common metrics used for DevOps are cycle time, deployment frequency, customer feedback, etc. These metrics give you insights into the product development cycle, the frequency of successful deployment of products, and similar processes. It is also important to receive data on negative feedback, like unplanned work rate and change failure rate, to streamline your DevOps process better.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Read More</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><a href="https://devopsden.io/article/vercel-vs-heroku"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">https://devopsden.io/article/vercel-vs-heroku</span></a></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Follow us on</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/devopsden/">https://www.linkedin.com/company/devopsden/</a></p>
