Through six years of research, the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified four key metrics that indicate the performance of a software development team:

• Deployment Frequency - How often an organization successfully releases to production
• Lead Time for Changes - The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production
• Change Failure Rate - The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production
• Time to Restore Service - How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production

At a high level, Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes measure velocity, while Change Failure Rate and Time to Restore Service measure stability. And by measuring these values, and continuously iterating to improve on them, a team can achieve significantly better business outcomes. DORA, for example, uses these metrics to identify Elite, High, Medium and Low performing teams, and finds that Elite teams are twice as likely to meet or exceed their organizational performance goals.1

Baselining your organization’s performance on these metrics is a great way to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your own operations. But how do you get started? The journey starts with gathering data. To help you generate these metrics for your team, we created the Four Keys open source project, which automatically sets up a data ingestion pipeline from your Github or Gitlab repos through Google Cloud services and into Google DataStudio. It then aggregates your data and compiles it into a dashboard with these key metrics, which you can use to track your progress over time.

To use the Four Keys project, we’ve included a setup script in the repo to make it easy to collect data from the default sources and view your DORA metrics. For anyone interested in contributing to the project or customizing it to their own team’s use cases, we’ve outlined the three key components below: the pipeline, the metrics, and the dashboard.

The Four Keys pipeline

The Four Keys pipeline is the ETL pipeline which collects your DevOps data and transforms it into DORA metrics.

One of the challenges of gathering these DORA metrics, however, is that, for any one team (let alone all the teams in an organization), deployment, change, and incident data are usually in different disparate systems. How do we develop an open-source tool that can capture data from these different sources—as well as from sources that you may want to use in the future?

With Four Keys, our solution was to create a generalized pipeline that can be extended to process inputs from a wide variety of sources. Any tool or system that can output an HTTP request can be integrated into the Four Keys pipeline, which receives events via webhooks and ingests them into BigQuery.

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In the Four Keys pipeline, known data sources are parsed properly into changes, incidents and deployments. For example, GitHub commits are picked up by the changes script, Cloud Build deployments fall under deployments, and GitHub issues with an ‘incident’ label are categorized as incidents. If a new data source is added and the existing querie s do not categorize it properly, the developer can recategorize it by editing the SQL script.

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