According to recent reports from the State of DevOps, incorporating DevOps practices has shown impressive numbers, including; 7x lower change failure rates, 2,604x faster time to recover from incidents, and 208x more frequent code deployments.
The power of these organizations is overwhelming. If your business has not already incorporated the practice into its workflow, it is in its best interest to. Find out where it can start here and now.
Determining What DevOps Means to You
Most important DevOps are about having all aspects of operations visible and your organization being able to control them. The ability to manipulate all aspects of the development process will ultimately make the process itself easier.
The metrics measured and recorded in the DevOps workflow are essential for efficiency in the KPI or “Key Performance Indicator” process. This process consists of the following;
- Identify
- Create
- Evaluate
- Change
- Assess
Many believe that it is essential to analyze all aspects of a business procedure to ensure that things are in the best operating function. But that is not always the case and can lead to a great deal of wasted time. There are a set of qualities that should be observed;
- Relevant—said metric must be measuring something of importance to business
- Measurable—it must be of a proper measurable function, “good” or “great” is not a quantifiable function.
- Incorruptible—any team member can not affect the results.
- Traceable—any metric measured must point to the root cause rather than merely suggesting a problem if there should be one
- Actionable—over time, any analysis of said metric must provide insight on policy, workflow, and other systems of procedure
Deployment Frequency
One of the top metrics to measure is how often you are making deployments. Your ultimate goal is to do smaller deployments more often. By creating smaller deployments at frequent intervals, you will make it easier to test and evaluate.
Going hand in hand with the frequency, it is wise to track the amount of time that it takes to perform a deployment, from start to full test. By doing this, it will allow you to streamline deployment better and understand any problems during the process.
Repository Speed
Pull requests are given a score based on their time from submission to review and merge onto an organization’s workplace. A “perfect” score is given to an organization when their average time comes between zero and two “workdays.”
At times there are old requests that get lost in the mix of things, bringing down average “scores.”This can especially be a problem if an organization is working with more than one repository.
A problem arises when developers create a push request before the application is entirely ready for production. This will cause the request to remain open for an extended period.
Their over-eagerness costs them in the end.
Mean Time to Recover
Meantime to recover or MTTR is an essential metric as it records how efficiently you respond to and fix any problems that arise along the development path. Shooting for approximately no more than 8 hours for completion is optimal for a developer.
Failed Deployments and Error Rates
Continuing with recovery and response to problems, it is crucial to record any issues that occur. Of course, you never want to have a failed deployment but use one as a learning tool if there is one.
By tracking both failed deployments and error rates, you can pinpoint exactly where errors occur and identify why errors occur more quickly. This is essential in the troubleshooting process and will aid in the MTTR process.
Working to reverse a failed deployment is not something you want to have to deal with, but you must always plan for it in your workflow.
Error Rate(s)
There are two major concerns when tracking error rates, and they are;
- Production Issues—Problems such as query timeouts and database access connections
- Bugs—new exception errors in the code of your application after a recent deployment
As we would expect, these problems are just like the development of any application. It is when there is a consistent pattern of these problems that concern arises. That is why it is an essential metric to keep aware of and address.
Lead Time for Changes
This is another essential metric very closely related to MTTR. It records how much time you need to implement a change. Because any development cycle is a long process, it is essential to keep track of any changes and the time it takes.
By monitoring each change along your workflow, you can observe where problems arise. You can also determine your resources are enough to handle project needs.
When looking at goal times, you want to shoot for less than an hour. When you are recording more than four hours, you want to evaluate your workflow. If you are ever above 24 hours, there is an urgent call to address the workflow.
A long lead time always reflects inefficiency at some stage in the process, so the longer the lead time, the bigger the issue.
Deployment Stability
Another critical metric to be on top of is deployment stability. This measures the percentage of time that the current build offered is successfully released.
There is not always a problem with development on your end if there is a “broken” build, and that is where testing comes in, where appropriate test automation should be utilized.
But, if you continue to push “broken” builds to deployment, that is when a problem will occur. The workflow will be disrupted for developers and the organization as a whole.
You want to keep this metric at 90% or higher and should address anything lower than that.
DevOps Metrics Essential to Optimal Operations
This is the information you need to be keeping track of; there is no denying the value of these DevOps metrics to the development process, but how much easier would it be with help from experts along the way? Let your focus be on the application you are working so hard on. Let those at apica.io help with your metric recording and deployment. With our help, you can dedicate more time to making the best application you and your users could hope for!
