DORA metrics in Tanzu Developer Portal

This topic tells you about viewing DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics in Tanzu Developer Portal.

Overview

DORA is a research program for studying the capabilities that drive software delivery and operations performance. DORA helps teams apply these capabilities to improve organizational performance. For more information about DORA, see the DORA website.

DORA metrics are a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that DORA has developed to measure the effectiveness of an organization’s DevOps practices. These metrics help organizations to assess their software development and delivery processes and identify areas for improvement.

Collecting DORA metrics can be challenging because it involves:

  • Gathering data from various sources and tools
  • Ensuring data accuracy and consistency
  • Dealing with organizational and cultural resistance to measurement and improvement

Tanzu Application Platform is uniquely positioned to provide DORA metrics through its integrated supply chain. This supply chain offers end-to-end visibility and control over the entire development and deployment process, enabling comprehensive measurement and optimization of DevOps practices.

DORA metrics

DORA metrics include:

  • Deployment Frequency, which measures how often code changes are deployed to an environment. High deployment frequency is often associated with a mature DevOps culture.

  • Lead Time for Changes, which measures the time it takes to go from code committed to code successfully running in an environment. Shortening this lead time is often a goal of DevOps practices.

  • Change Failure Rate, which measures the rate at which changes to the production environment cause failures or incidents. Lower failure rates indicate a reliable software delivery process.

  • Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), which measures how quickly an organization can recover from incidents or outages in production. A lower MTTR suggests that an organization resolves issues quickly.

Supported DORA metrics

This table shows supported DORA metrics in the Tanzu Application Platform v1.9.1 DORA plug-in. Support for more metrics is planned for later DORA plug-in versions.

DORA metric Tanzu Application Platform v1.9.1 DORA plug-in support
Deployment Frequency Yes
Lead Time for Changes Yes
Change Failure Rate No
Mean Time to Recovery No

Use the DORA plug-in

To use the DORA plug-in:

  1. Select the component you want to view DORA metrics for.

  2. Click the DORA tab in the navigation list.

DORA metric calculation

By default, DORA metrics are calculated from the average number of deployments to all environments in the last 7 days. Two filtering options are available from drop-down menus:

  • By date range, based on a predefined set of choices
  • By environment, based on the location labels configured by a platform engineer

For more information about location configuration, see Configure Artifact Metadata Repository.

DORA graphs display trends of Lead Time and Deployment Frequency metrics over time.

The Lead Time graph displays in bars the daily average time taken for a code change to go from a commit to a running container. The trend line illustrates the average lead time for deployments made in the last 7 days.

The Deployment Frequency graph displays the frequency of code changes deployed to production, depicted in daily bars and a corresponding 7-day moving average trend line.

Tanzu workloads have a correlation ID that groups all the artifacts together.

The DORA tab is selected in Tanzu Developer Portal, revealing the graphs.

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