What are DORA Metrics?

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:

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

Stability:

Change failure rate — the percentage of deployments that degrade service and need remediation.
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).

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, 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: 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, and the four DORA metrics become dashboard queries over data you already own — no separate delivery-analytics product required.

Frequently asked questions

What are the four DORA metrics?

Deployment frequency (how often you ship to production), lead time for changes (commit to production), change failure rate (share of deployments causing degradation), and failed deployment recovery time (how quickly you restore service after a bad change). The first two measure velocity, the last two measure stability.

What are elite DORA performance levels?

In the DORA research, elite performers deploy on demand (multiple times per day), have lead times under a day, keep change failure rates low (roughly 5% or better in recent reports), and recover from failed deployments in under an hour. Thresholds shift slightly with each annual State of DevOps report.

Do DORA metrics replace SLOs?

No - they answer different questions. DORA metrics measure how well you deliver change; SLOs measure how reliable the running service is for users. High DORA velocity with breached SLOs means you ship fast and break things; healthy teams watch both.