DevOps Without Measurement Is a Fail

It’s becoming an increasingly common scenario for many organizations: you’re now months into your DevOps initiative but the results are still hard to see. While automation efforts have made it easier to provision resources, bottlenecks in the flow of work are still forming elsewhere and your engineers are struggling to reduce toil from unexpected outages and performance issues.

The collaboration across siloed teams that DevOps promises is increasingly shown to deliver more code deploys, reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR), reduced lead time for changes, and ultimately business impact.1

However, the transformation that’s required to achieve those outcomes is certainly not easy. What’s needed is a mindset shift that impacts the entire chain of work.

The question “how will you measure this?” is at the core of any good engineering culture. Whether it’s a new feature deployed to production or a broader organizational initiative, measurement is the tie that binds your efforts to meaningful results for everyone to see. Conversely, work that doesn’t link to measurable goals can experience a backlash when teams and individuals feel they are being exploited or undervalued (for example, being on-call after business hours) versus using data to measurably prove success that builds a sense of being part of a shared journey.

You can’t know for sure that you are achieving business success with your DevOps approach unless you measure the right things and manage your DevOps operation to continuously keep the key performance indicators in view. Think of it this way: DevOps without measurement—or without measuring the right things—is a fail.

This ebook will introduce you to five critical drivers of DevOps success and show you how and what to measure to achieve that success: business success, customer experience, application and infrastructure performance, engineering velocity, and quality.