# What are DORA Metrics?

> DORA metrics are four research-backed measures of software delivery performance - deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and failed deployment recovery time.

Source: https://openobserve.ai/glossary/what-is-dora-metrics/
Published: 2026-07-08
Term: DORA Metrics
Category: SRE & Incident Response
Related terms: mttr-vs-mttd, what-is-error-budget, slo-sla-sli

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**DORA metrics** are four measures of software delivery performance identified by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program - the multi-year research effort behind the *State of DevOps* reports and the book *Accelerate*. Their finding: velocity and stability are not a trade-off; the best teams are fast *and* safe, and these four numbers predict it.

## The four metrics

**Velocity:**

1. **Deployment frequency** - how often code reaches production. Elite teams deploy on demand, many times a day.
2. **Lead time for changes** - from commit to running in production. Elite: under a day.

**Stability:**

3. **Change failure rate** - the percentage of deployments that degrade service and need remediation.
4. **Failed deployment recovery time** - how long restoring service takes after a bad change (the successor to the older "time to restore service," and a close cousin of [MTTR](/glossary/mttr-vs-mttd/)).

The pairing is deliberate: measuring velocity alone rewards recklessness, stability alone rewards stagnation. Improving all four simultaneously is the signature of strong engineering organizations.

## Measuring DORA metrics

The data lives in systems you already run: deployment events from CI/CD ([GitHub Actions telemetry](/blog/capturing-pulse-of-your-github-actions/), Jenkins, Argo CD), commit timestamps from version control, and incident/rollback data from your observability platform. The practical approach is to emit deployments and incidents as events into your telemetry backend and compute the four rates with queries and dashboards - the same way you treat any other time-series data.

## Using them well

- Track trends per team, not league tables across teams - context differs
- Pair with [SLOs](/glossary/slo-sla-sli/): DORA measures delivery of change, SLOs measure the user experience of the result
- Treat a rising change failure rate as a systems signal (test gaps, risky release patterns), not individual blame

## DORA metrics in OpenObserve

Ship CI/CD and deployment events to OpenObserve alongside your incidents and [alerts](/alerts/), and the four DORA metrics become [dashboard](/visualization-and-dashboards/) queries over data you already own - no separate delivery-analytics product required.