
Measuring the success of your DevOps approach is an essential part of measuring the success of your overall engineering team. DevOps metrics can often serve as indicators of how successfully your teams are able to navigate their software development environment. They can apply to all teams within your organization: frontend engineers, backend developers, SREs, security teams, and more.
As the purview of development operations expands, measuring DevOps metrics has become more important to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, tool sprawl issues, and delivery challenges. New concepts like platform engineering have emerged to address, measure, and help improve this work across your pipeline.
In this article, we’ll discuss why it’s important to use tools that help you measure your key DevOps metrics, and how they can provide broader improvements to your SDLC when adopted and integrated into your pipeline properly.
Benefits of using DevOps metrics tools
Platform engineers are motivated by a drive to routinize, standardize, and scale development operations across the organization. Platform engineering is an approach to DevOps that aims to unify teams under “golden paths,” or reusable, repeatable frameworks for deployment excellence.
The platform engineer’s focus is creating a single platform and portal that provides developers a clear path to deployment while still maintaining the standards set by managers. Many choose to use an internal developer portal to unify their platform into a single, web-based interface that devs can use to access systems across their entire pipeline.
This can help remediate several major issues developers face with their current deployment systems:
- Dealing with tool sprawl: Up to 75% of developers lose somewhere between 6-15 hours per week to navigating between many different development tools and software, according to the 2025 State of Internal Developer Portals report. Unifying the data from multiple tools in the portal can significantly reduce the amount of time devs spend switching between tools and drawing conclusions from disparate sources.
- Inaccurate engineering metadata: Using the portal gives developers the ability to see data from all tools at once. This enables them to make more informed decisions, determine which problems have the biggest impact on key metrics, and understand how problems in one system can relate to other, dependent systems.
- Relying on stale documentation: DevOps metrics tools can be a source of input for creating automated documentation. As the tool ingests updates, versions, and standards you set, the tool can also update documentation for each of these tools and systems in the form of a software catalog, dependency blueprints, or ownership guides.
- Poor developer experience: Developers want to spend more time coding, not switching between tools or reading through endless documentation versions trying to figure out what works. Most DevOps metrics tools offer solutions like self-service actions that eliminate all of that research and replace them with repeatable, reliable ways of getting more done.
DevOps performance metrics you should track
DORA metrics are a popular, powerful way to measure DevOps performance. They offer a clear set of four metrics that roll up to explain the health and performance of your software’s stability and team’s throughput:
- Stability metrics:
- Throughput metrics:
- Deployment frequency
- Lead time for changes
Together, these metrics can be used to identify ways of improving your engineering practices and track progress against goals like encouraging smaller deployments to increase deployment frequency or improving documentation to shorten your mean time to recovery.
Beyond DORA metrics, though, there exist many other kinds of metrics that could help you improve DevOps practices and give your leadership team more insight into how, where, and why breakdowns in the software delivery process impact things like customer retention, cloud costs, developer toil, and more. Using any DevOps metrics tool, you can break these down into smaller categories, focus on the ones that have the most impact, and track the impact of your changes with features like dashboards and initiatives.
How to measure DevOps success
Below are some example metrics that aren’t included in DORA, but are related to improving DevOps performance:
- Build/test metrics: These focus on your ability to build and test code thoroughly, which improves code throughput by ensuring that code is written fast and accurately. Examples include code coverage, defect escape rate, and build failure rate.
- Deployment metrics: These are again related to throughput and include metrics like cycle time, which can serve as a helpful fact in estimating future work.
- Operations metrics: Operations metrics typically include site reliability metrics, such as uptime and mean time between failures, which help you identify how often your system experiences outages and how frequently they occur. This could be a helpful metric when you’re trying to improve your site reliability.
- Security metrics: You’re likely already tracking security metrics as a best practice, and the data you gather here — such as incident volume and vulnerability remediation time — will be useful to gather improvement ideas once you’ve started tracking DORA metrics.
These additional metrics can make it easier to demonstrate the impact of your DevOps success across your software delivery environment. With each set of niche metrics focused on specific areas of development and operations, you can dig into deeper layers of your pipeline to make further improvements.
How to choose the right DevOps metrics tool for your team
Whether you have a DevOps metrics tool in place, want to switch to another, or want to adopt one for the first time, you should decide what you want to measure. This can be done through developer surveys, team meetings, pipeline assessments, or any combination of communications with your team — but make sure your team is involved from the beginning to ensure smooth adoption.
- If you have a tool in place: What’s working, and what isn’t? Start your re-implementation with a developer survey. Encourage your team to give honest feedback about the tools they use, the systems they interact with, and the processes they use to deliver software.
- If you are evaluating tools to adopt: Where are your existing tool gaps, documentation pains, or process breakdowns? What kinds of things do you need to improve before you can focus on DORA metrics, or are you already tracking them? Assess your entire software development pipeline — and consider a developer survey as well — and prioritize the areas of work you will focus on improving after adopting the new tool.
Regardless of where you are in tool evaluation, you’ll want to prepare your teams to participate in the process. This preparation can include many things, but the most important will be to appoint tool pilots. These are typically platform or DevOps engineers, who will make sure adoption tasks are part of your roadmapping process, conduct the developer surveys, plan the customization work needed for your tools, and maintain the tool once it has been adopted.
Top 5 DevOps metrics tools
There are many tools available to measure DevOps metrics. Below, we gathered five that will help you integrate your existing tool set into a unified, more trackable interface that will make tracking metrics easy.
1. Port
Port is an open internal developer portal that makes tracking DevOps metrics easy and intuitive. It unifies your entire tech stack into a single user interface that is accessible to everyone in your engineering organization.
Internal developer portals generally offer everything you need to measure DevOps metrics, develop better software engineering practices, and drive change across your engineering organization. They give you an advantage over traditional DevOps metrics tracking options by offering:
- Scorecards, which you can customize according to your software requirements and implement across teams to standardize compliance.
- Initiatives, which unite your scorecards and help you tell a story about your organization’s stability and security.
- Dashboards that contextualize all of your data from within your systems, offering you more insights into your team’s throughput and stability, and allow you to trace whether one metric is being impacted by another (i.e., to see if deployment frequency is impacting change failure rate).
Port itself offers all three of these features as well as built-in RBAC that can help you slice data by team, project, or any other focus you need. Rather than boxing you into a preordained
With in-context data about your teams’ throughput and stability metrics, you can quickly identify the unique problems affecting your DevOps metrics, set initiatives to resolve them, implement scorecards to prevent further issues, and create dashboards to monitor your metrics going forward.

2. Swarmia
Swarmia is a software engineering intelligence tool offering several features that may help you measure DevOps metrics in your organization. It offers a feature called Investment Balance, which helps engineering managers balance workloads across many types of projects and measure the effort put into every project. You can separate projects into categories, like reducing technical debt and building new features, and coordinate similar tasks into one project.
This is helpful for measuring DevOps metrics because it surfaces data about build and test metrics, deployment metrics, operations metrics, and security alongside DORA metrics, making it easier to draw conclusions about your team’s health and performance.

Using Investment Balance, you can view progress against your key DevOps metrics across time and project, which can help you gain better insight into where your teams need to put in more effort to improve things, where you need to develop new processes, and more.
3. Jellyfish
Jellyfish offers an engineering intelligence platform that focuses on curating data for engineering metrics, including DevOps metrics. It offers customizable dashboards for measuring all kinds of metrics, such as DORA metrics, and like other options, give you the ability to layer in other kinds of metrics to gain a fuller understanding of where your team’s productivity is falling short and how to resolve it.
You can also use Jellyfish metrics to do things like advance operational maturity, plan sprints and conduct retrospectives, and make improvements across your teams to deliver faster and more efficiently. Using its Benchmarks feature, you can also level up your organization according to industry standards, decide which new tools to adopt, and incorporate suggested workflows used by other leading software companies.
4. Cortex
Cortex is another internal developer portal that integrates with your tech stack and gives you the ability to develop engineering metrics, either from the tools you integrate or other common benchmarks. Cortex provides some metrics tracking capabilities out of the box, as well as monitoring dashboards you can use to track and communicate changes in performance.
Like other internal developer portals, Cortex offers you scorecards and initiatives alongside visual representations of your data and systems to track DevOps metrics. But Cortex has a strict data model when ingesting data from your systems that limits the repeatability and customization of your metrics tracking infrastructure. While this won’t affect your data quality, it may impact your ability to tailor the portal to your specific needs and interests — for example, you may only be able to use industry benchmarks when tracking DevOps metrics, instead of your team’s past performance.
5. Backstage
Backstage, the open source framework from Spotify, allows you to scaffold your own internal developer portal on top of a predefined data model. This, similar to Cortex, may limit your ability to customize and track metrics, but still offers scorecards, initiatives, dashboards, and more.
Still, one of the many things Backstage is known for is their community plugins, which give you some added flexibility and functionality after you’ve scaffolded your portal. These plugins can give you additional features, like dashboards or industry benchmarks for DORA metrics, but they don’t affect the way data is ingested, which means it will be difficult to overcome information silos the way a more flexible portal or engineering intelligence platform would be able to do.
Wrapping up
The hardest part of measuring DevOps metrics is gathering all of the data you need in one place — so let a tool do that for you. There are many different ways to slice and dice the data your engineering teams generate during regular development cycles, and the tools described in this article are especially useful for organizing your data, tightening your standards, and continuously improving your DevOps metrics.
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