dora-controller

DORA controller

This controller collects four DORA metrics:

• cycle time (commit to deployment)

• deploy frequency

• mean time to recovery

• change fail percentage

To gather metrics for your deployment, add the following annotation(s):

• dora/team (e.g. frontend, ops) - required

• dora/commitTimestamp (Unix time, e.g. "1555126199") - optional; required only for cycle time measurement

Note that the numerical commit timestamp must be quoted for the deployment to validate. (Annotation values are strings.)

Maintaining state

The controller does not retain state beyond a simple datastructure mapping teams to deployment names with certain properties of the most recent deployment.

Single-line JSON log messages are written to STDOUT. Aggregation and data analysis is pushed out to central log management (be that EFK, Splunk or another kind of tool entirely).

Cycle time is retrieved by filtering for flag DORA_SUCCESSFUL_DEPLOYMENT and the cycleTimeSeconds attribute. (Only available when deployments are annotated as indicated above.)

Deployment frequency can be measured by counting log entries with flag DORA_SUCCESSFUL_DEPLOYMENT (and, if desired, DORA_FAILED_DEPLOYMENT).

To compute the mean time to recovery over a period of time, filter for DORA_RECOVERY and the recoverySeconds attribute.

The change fail percentage is DORA_FAILED_DEPLOYMENT divided by DORA_SUCCESSFUL_DEPLOYMENT || 1 times one hundred.

Known limitations

No attempt is made to distinguish between regular deployment, patches, hotfixes, and so on. Any deployment with a changed Docker image or tag is treated as a new code release. To measure cycle time, the build/CI system has to record the timestamp of the final git commit in annotation form. Lead time is out of scope as it would require an external data source (e.g. date task/story added to backlog).

Deployment

Use or adapt the Helm chart for in-cluster deployment. helm template . will write out suitable manifests. For out-of cluster use, specify the path to your Kubernetes config file or export KUBECONFIG:

$ ./dora-controller --kubeconfig=${HOME}/.kube/config