Metrics for DevOps Success
Today, DevOps practices and culture are considered an indispensable element of the delivery process of a business. Key DevOps mechanisms cover everything from security to application maintenance. While there are numerous and ample good resources for DevOps guidelines, various tutorials available which cover DevOps basics and fundamentals, various websites covering most of the key DevOps content, enterprises looking to adopt the DevOps practices and culture still lack knowledge and do not know when and how to use DevOps the right way to solve the problems.
That is why, it is highly recommended by big successful organizations to encourage employees and newbies interested in this forever evolving booming technology – DevOps, to get a Devopsu’ DevOps certification and proper training. Through the DevOps certification training individual will learn and fundamental knowledge to
advance insights and DevOps metrics about utilizing the DevOps they way which could benefit them.
Purpose of DevOps within Organization
DevOps not only helps speeding up the development, deployment, distribution process, but it also helps organizations to better the application quality and performance. Since, in DevOps most of the process and tasks are automated, development and operations no longer have to go through long, risky manual processes. This saves the organization’s time by spending more time in resolving customers issues and application errors and less time in tedious tasks.
Using DevOps practices and metrics the right way, promises desired results which could give organization a competitive edge. By putting a great emphasis on the DevOps metrics, organizations can monitor the progress to ensure their efforts and strategies are moving in the right path.
In this blog, we have put together a couple of key metrics for DevOps, which if used the right way, could bring DevOps success and maximum benefits in the name of revenue and leads for the business.
Metrics for DevOps Success
By tracking and focusing solely on the metrics agencies can evaluate and design relevant objective measures to determine which change can have more positive impact on the business success.
⮚ Measuring and Analyzing Business Goal
For any organization, the first and highest priority is the satisfaction of their customers either means of fast software delivery or by simply offering customer support to their queries. It would not be wrong to say that customer satisfaction is counted as one of the metrics which is relevant to the business goal. But there are other factors which the organization need to define and put upfront to meet the business goal.
Having design, develop, and delivery of valuable software is not the only thing important for the business but measuring how this software can help in generating the target revenue, grow customers, minimize the costs or any other goals or objectives that companies need to fulfill. Here, close communication with the executive, stakeholder and other VIPs to know about the business goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) to track the business success as well identify loopholes.
⮚ Measuring Deployment Frequency
Measuring deployment frequency could be defined as the time taken by the application to deploy and how frequently the deployment takes place. This metric helps in monitoring the development process and the use of new code for every deployment. Furthermore, measurement of deployment is a good metrics for DevOps success by performing smaller deployment as many times as possible. Smaller deployments help in thorough testing and release tasks of applications.
Additionally, keeping a track of this metric helps in calculating “deployments per day” which directly help in monitoring how often an individual developer deployed applications per day.
Keeping a close eye on this metric will help in maintaining the quality control of the application as you are making sure deployment to the testing and pre-production environment is made as often as possible. This will help in early testing and quick bug fixing and early release to market. This will also help in decreasing the defect rate to minimum.
⮚ Lead Time for Changes
Lead time for changes, in simple words, is a time calculated for code committed to the time it is deployed on the production environment. As the continuous process is a key to the successful completion of software development cycle, Lead for time changes metric is important for DevOps success. This helps the DevOps team to know how long it takes to complete a new task on average till it is sent to the production. This will also help the DevOps team to be in complete control of the project and help in time management.
⮚ Failed deployments Rate
Failed deployment is when users are faced problems when deployment is done. In DevOps, the main purpose is to speed up the delivery and deployment process by automating each phase in the software development cycle, but it also put great emphasis on the quality and performance. Therefore, it is important to introduce new features and updates quickly, but not at the expense of quality.
This metric is specifically considered as a crucial benchmark in DevOps as keeping track of the failed deployment rate that causes negative user response helps in minimizing the failed outcomes. To solve this issue, it is suggested that deployments should be made in smaller sizes rather. That way it would be easy to solve 4-5 problems out of 100 deployments.
Automated Testing
The main success relies heavily on automation. In DevOps, from continuous integration to continuous testing, and then continuous deployment and to achieve that automation plays an important role. In DevOps, automation means “configuration as code” which is not an option but crucial to remove the silos. Similarly, automated testing helps in minimizing the errors by having tests at every step of software development. Smart use automation will eventually help in shorten the delivery time.
Furthermore, tools like AWS are high in demand which meet the criteria of automation testing and automation of every process in DevOps. The tool caters to the demand of DevOps to simplify the development process. People looking to extend their career in DevOps and AWS can get AWS DevOps training online.
⮚ Bugs Tracking
Monitoring errors and bugs within an application is a crucial metric for the development and deployment success. Keeping a track of bugs help identify the loopholes which could cause the quality of an application as well point out performance and downtime related problems.
It is important to keep a close eye on the error rates and fix them at earliest.
Tools like Pivotal Tracker and Atlassian JIRA are used to track bug, performance and other relevant issues within your application.
- Select the Right DevOps Tools
As new/old big and small businesses have started to adopt the DevOps culture, many still struggle when it comes to selecting the tools for DevOps. Many tools are available which caters to different needs of DevOps environments. Having a right tool is another important DevOps metrics which is often overlooked which leads to missing out in several DevOps opportunities.
Businesses looking to incorporate DevOps practices should focus on using open source DevOps tools. Tools like AWS, Kubernets, JIRA, Docker, Gituhub, CodeShip, ReadyAPI, New Relic and many more are easily available. Before installing any, make sure you areaware of the objective of your business needs.
Final Words
In addition to the DevOps metrics mentioned above, there are several other DevOps metrics you can monitor and track which are important for your application need and business. Most people overlook these metrics but for the success of DevOps, these metrics are crucial. Similarly, having a proper training in DevOps is also crucial for the DevOps success. You can easily get DevOps certification online.
