DORA Metrics in the Akuity Platform

We are excited to announce the availability of the DORA Metrics Dashboard in the Akuity Platform. The DORA Metrics Dashboard is a powerful tool that helps you understand how your team is performing and identify areas for improvement.

What are DORA metrics?

One of the main benefits of using Kubernetes is empowering application developers to deploy their applications faster and more reliably. Kubernetes breaks the barrier between developers and operations teams, allowing developers to independently make infrastructure changes without depending on the operations team, employ advanced rollout strategies, and ultimately deliver value to the end users faster. GitOps operators like Argo CD implement an opinionated way of managing Kubernetes resources, allowing developers to take full advantage of Kubernetes and make the team more productive. The question is, how much more productive?

DORA metrics are meant to help you answer this question. It is an industry-standard for measuring the performance and efficiency of engineering systems and processes proposed by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team at Google.

DORA metrics are measuring various aspects of the software delivery process and include the following critical measures:

Deployment Frequency: How often your team successfully releases to production.
Lead Time for Changes: The amount of time it takes for a commit to get into production.
Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that result in a failure in production.
Time to Resolution: The time it takes to recover from a failure in production.

For simplicity, we can think of DORA metrics as two pairs of metrics. The deployment frequency and lead time for changes measure the velocity of the team, while the change failure rate and time to restore service measure the stability. By consistently measuring these values and iterating on them, a team can drive substantial improvements in business outcomes.

How Does Akuity Platform Help?

Implementing DORA metrics in your organization can be challenging. It requires collecting data from various sources, aggregating it, and presenting it in a way that is easy to understand and act upon. The Akuity Platform manages Argo CD, which drives workload deployments and naturally collects the data about deployments. However, Argo CD provides only half of the picture since it operates at the level of a single service deployment and is not aware of the broader context, such as various service environments and the lifecycle of deployment artifacts. The recent addition of Kargo as a managed service to the Akuity Platform fills this gap!

Kargo is a GitOps continuous promotion tool for Kubernetes that helps track the lifecycle of deployment artifacts and orchestrates promotion across multiple environments. Kargo is responsible for detecting new artifacts, promoting them through the environments, and verifying the deployment's success. This way, Kargo collects the remaining half of the data and enables the Akuity Platform to provide the full picture of the deployment process.

DORA Metrics Dashboard

The DORA Metrics Dashboard is available in the Akuity Platform portal UI. Once you create a managed Kargo instance, the dashboard is available in the Metrics tab of Kargo instance details. With no additional configuration, you can start enjoying the benefits of using Kargo and track the performance of your team.

The dashboard allows for the selection of the time range and provides various filters to drill down into the data. In addition to the DORA charts the portal UI provides the events tab that shows detailed information about the Kargo promotion events with detailed information about the deployment artifacts and the promotion status.

Conclusion

The DORA Metrics Dashboard in the Akuity Platform provides a powerful tool for understanding how your team is performing and identifying areas for improvement. The combination of Argo CD and Kargo provides a complete solution for managing Kubernetes workloads and tracking the performance of your team. We are excited to see how our customers will use this tool to drive improvements in their software delivery process.