Introduction
Tracking performance is essential for DevOps teams to optimize both operational efficiency and system reliability. But how do you decide which metrics to focus on?
The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics, developed by Google, have emerged as the gold standard for measuring software delivery performance. DORA metrics help you monitor the productivity of your engineering teams and can detect bottlenecks in your development cycles.
As DORA metrics have gained traction among engineering managers and developers, numerous tools have emerged to facilitate tracking, measurement, and enforcement of standards. We’ll discuss the top ten tools in this article.
What are DORA metrics?
DORA metrics provide insight into how efficiently your team delivers software by focusing on key aspects like deployment frequency and lead time. Tracking and improving DORA metrics allows teams to streamline their workflows, reduce delays, and enhance overall performance.
The four DORA metrics are:
- Deployment frequency – How often your team successfully deploys code to production
- Lead time for changes – The time it takes from code commit to running in production
- Mean time to recover (MTTR) – The average time to restore service after an incident or outage
- Change failure rate (CFR) – The percentage of deployments that lead to production failures
Improving these metrics across teams results in reducing downtime, delivering features faster, and creating a more resilient product.
Top 10 tools to measure DORA metrics
The tools selected for this list were chosen based on their proven ability to effectively support and enhance the four key DORA metrics. Each tool stands out for its ability to integrate with software development pipelines, providing accurate, real-time insights that are crucial for optimizing team performance.
1. Port
Unlike many tools that are focused solely on visibility or productivity metrics, Port provides a holistic solution. As an internal developer portal, Port integrates with your entire tech stack (Git, CI/CD, incident management, etc.) and offers customizable dashboards to track key metrics, such as DORA, alongside engineering standards.
Once you’ve begun measuring team performance, Port allows you to dive deeper and track additional metrics such as:
- Pull request metrics
- Feature effectiveness
- Security and compliance
- Cloud costs and other FinOps
In addition, you get more than visibility — you can turn these insights into actionable solutions within Port’s platform with automations, notifications, alerts, and scorecards. You can implement these solutions directly in your portal to impact the metrics you choose to measure according to your own benchmarks and goals.
2. Swarmia
Swarmia integrates with tools like GitHub and Jira to monitor DORA metrics in real-time. It provides insights into delivery speed and bottlenecks, offering teams a way to track their performance and identify areas for improvement in their development workflows.
3. LinearB
LinearB provides insights into DORA metrics, such as deployment frequency and change failure rate. It integrates with GitHub, Jira, and Slack to help teams monitor performance and streamline their DevOps workflows, offering visibility into key areas of the software development process.
4. Jellyfish
Jellyfish provides detailed insights into software delivery performance, tracking key DORA metrics while focusing on workflow efficiency. It’s an ideal solution for engineering leaders looking to optimize team health and productivity.
5. Minware
Minware offers data driven insights into DORA metrics by analyzing development and CI/CD activity. Its real-time analytics improve delivery speed and productivity, helping teams reduce cycle times.
6. Code Climate
Code Climate Velocity emphasizes DORA metrics to improve software delivery performance. By tracking deployment frequency and change failure rates, it helps teams identify bottlenecks and improve overall efficiency.
7. Haystack
Haystack focuses on providing engineering insights, including DORA metrics, to help teams detect bottlenecks and improve delivery speed. It integrates with GitHub and other tools, offering visibility into the health of your development pipelines with real-time metrics and alerts.
8. Faros
Faros is an engineering operations platform that helps teams track DORA metrics alongside other key engineering KPIs. It provides a window into engineering data, integrating with tools like GitHub, Jira, and CircleCI to give a full view of software delivery performance.
9. Waydev
Waydev is an engineering intelligence platform that offers insights into your team’s DORA metrics. It integrates with tools like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, providing a data driven approach to improve deployment frequency, lead times, and overall engineering performance.
10. Uplevel
Uplevel is an engineering effectiveness platform that helps teams track DORA metrics such as deployment frequency and lead time for changes. By analyzing data from tools like GitHub, Jira, and Slack, Uplevel provides insights into team productivity and workflow efficiency.
Conclusion
Measuring DORA metrics helps engineering teams foster a culture of high performance, high quality code, and best-in-class productivity. With a system that gathers DORA metrics, engineering metrics, and standards compliance data in one place, engineering managers and team leads can more easily and effectively launch improvement initiatives, establish best practices, and make developers happy.
If you’re interested in seeing what an internal developer portal can do for your team, we recommend checking out Port’s open demo, where you can see all of this in action.
Book a demo right now to check out Port's developer portal yourself
It's a Trap - Jenkins as Self service UI
How do GitOps affect developer experience?
It's a Trap - Jenkins as Self service UI. Click her to download the eBook
Learning from CyberArk - building an internal developer platform in-house
Example JSON block
Order Domain
Cart System
Products System
Cart Resource
Cart API
Core Kafka Library
Core Payment Library
Cart Service JSON
Products Service JSON
Component Blueprint
Resource Blueprint
API Blueprint
Domain Blueprint
System Blueprint
Microservices SDLC
Scaffold a new microservice
Deploy (canary or blue-green)
Feature flagging
Revert
Lock deployments
Add Secret
Force merge pull request (skip tests on crises)
Add environment variable to service
Add IaC to the service
Upgrade package version
Development environments
Spin up a developer environment for 5 days
ETL mock data to environment
Invite developer to the environment
Extend TTL by 3 days
Cloud resources
Provision a cloud resource
Modify a cloud resource
Get permissions to access cloud resource
SRE actions
Update pod count
Update auto-scaling group
Execute incident response runbook automation
Data Engineering
Add / Remove / Update Column to table
Run Airflow DAG
Duplicate table
Backoffice
Change customer configuration
Update customer software version
Upgrade - Downgrade plan tier
Create - Delete customer
Machine learning actions
Train model
Pre-process dataset
Deploy
A/B testing traffic route
Revert
Spin up remote Jupyter notebook
Engineering tools
Observability
Tasks management
CI/CD
On-Call management
Troubleshooting tools
DevSecOps
Runbooks
Infrastructure
Cloud Resources
K8S
Containers & Serverless
IaC
Databases
Environments
Regions
Software and more
Microservices
Docker Images
Docs
APIs
3rd parties
Runbooks
Cron jobs
Check out Port's pre-populated demo and see what it's all about.
No email required
Contact sales for a technical product walkthrough
Open a free Port account. No credit card required
Watch Port live coding videos - setting up an internal developer portal & platform
Check out Port's pre-populated demo and see what it's all about.
(no email required)