DORA Metrics
Measuring software delivery performance — deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and restore time — directly from production telemetry rather than ticket archaeology.
- What are DORA metrics?DORA metrics are the four (now five) measures of software delivery performance identified by Google's DevOps Research and Assessment program. Learn what each metric captures, how teams use them as a diagnostic surface, and why telemetry-grounded measurement is more accurate than the ticket-based approach most tools use today.
- What is deployment frequency?Deployment frequency is the first of the DORA four key metrics: how often a team ships a production change. Learn what it measures, the gaming behaviors that distort it, the data-collection problems that stall most implementations, and how to compute it from deploy events without per-service configuration.
- What is lead time for changes?Lead time for changes is the DORA metric for how long it takes a code change to go from being authored to running in production. Learn what the different clock-start choices measure, why CI build/test time is often the dominant component, and how to compute lead time without manual configuration.
- What is reliability (the fifth DORA metric)?Reliability is the fifth DORA metric, added to the original four in recent State of DevOps reports. It captures the percentage of recent deployments that were unplanned fixes to user-facing bugs, tying the velocity and stability metrics back to user experience. Learn how reliability relates to SLOs and how to measure it from telemetry rather than from ticket counts.
- Why ticket-based DORA metrics fall shortMost DORA tools today compute change failure rate and mean time to recovery from incident tickets, revert pattern matching, and PM-tool labels. Each approach has known accuracy problems. Learn what each method captures, what each misses, and what telemetry-grounded measurement does differently.
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