[DL.CI.6] Refine integration pipelines with build metrics

Category: RECOMMENDED

Use key metrics—whether sourced from this guidance, established frameworks like DORA or SPACE, or custom to your organization—to optimize your continuous integration process. Metrics such as deployment frequency, change lead time, failure rate, and time to recover serve as outcome-based lagging indicators. These indicators span many DevOps capabilities to provide insights into the efficiency and reliability of the full delivery process. While individual metrics offer granular insights to optimize specific continuous integration capabilities, these aggregated metrics present a holistic overview of the end-to-end development lifecycle. Both granular and holistic metrics are important for continuous improvement.

Embed observability practices into your integration pipelines, incorporating monitoring and logging observability capabilities. By transforming logs into metrics, you gain actionable insights into areas needing refinement. Prioritize making these metrics accessible to all team members to create an environment where teams can proactively monitor, analyze, and improve based on these metrics.

Putting an emphasis on continually optimizing pipelines using metrics is recommended. When getting started with DevOps adoption, initial efforts should prioritize the establishment of a stable and effective integration pipeline, with subsequent enhancements to the pipeline being driven by metrics.