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Documentation Index

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The four DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service — measure engineering team performance across both velocity and stability.

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The four metrics

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1. Deployment frequency

How often your team deploys to production.
PerformanceFrequency
EliteOn-demand (multiple times per day)
HighWeekly to monthly
MediumMonthly to every six months
LowLess than once every six months

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2. Lead time for changes

Time from code commit to running in production.
PerformanceLead time
EliteLess than one day
HighOne day to one week
MediumOne week to one month
LowMore than six months

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3. Change failure rate

Percentage of deployments that cause a failure requiring remediation (rollback, hotfix, or patch).
PerformanceFailure rate
Elite0–15%
High16–30%
Medium16–30%
Low46–60%

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4. Time to restore service (MTTR)

How long it takes to recover from a failure in production.
PerformanceRecovery time
EliteLess than one hour
HighLess than one day
MediumOne day to one week
LowMore than six months

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Why DORA matters

DORA research (now part of Google Cloud) demonstrated that these four metrics predict both software delivery performance and organizational performance. Teams that excel on all four metrics:
  • Deploy more frequently with fewer failures
  • Recover faster when things break
  • Have higher employee satisfaction
  • Deliver more business value
The key insight: velocity and stability are not tradeoffs. Elite teams are both fast and reliable.

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How monitoring helps

Uptime monitoring directly impacts two DORA metrics:

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Change failure rate

Monitoring immediately tells you whether a deployment caused a failure. Without monitoring, failed deployments can go undetected for hours, distorting your metrics.

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Time to restore service

Faster detection (MTTD) means faster restoration (MTTR). Automated monitoring with clear alerting is the foundation of rapid recovery.

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Improving DORA metrics

MetricImprovement strategy
Deployment frequencySmaller PRs, CI/CD automation, feature flags
Lead timeAutomated testing, trunk-based development, fast CI
Change failure rateBetter testing, canary deploys, monitoring-gated rollouts
Time to restoreAutomated rollback, playbooks, alerting with context

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Monitoring as Code and DORA

Monitoring as Code specifically improves DORA metrics by:
  • Deployment frequency — monitoring config deploys alongside code changes
  • Lead time — automated validation catches issues in CI, not production
  • Change failure rate — monitoring changes are reviewed in PRs like code
  • MTTR — consistent monitoring setup across environments speeds diagnosis

MTTR & MTTD

The incident metrics that feed into DORA’s MTTR.

CI/CD patterns

Automate monitoring deploys to improve all four metrics.