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Why Metrics Must Guide Your DevOps Initiative

Jonah Kowall

Metrics-oriented thinking is key to continuous improvement – and a core tenant of any agile or DevOps philosophy. Metrics are factual and once agreed upon, these facts are used to drive discussions and methods. They also allow for a collaborative effort to execute decisions that contribute towards business outcomes.

DevOps, although becoming a commonly used job title, is not a role or person and there is no playbook or rule set to follow. Instead, DevOps is a philosophy which spans people, process, and technology. The goal is releasing better software more rapidly, and keeping said software up and running by joining development and operational responsibilities together.

Additionally, DevOps aims to improve business outcomes, but there are challenges in selecting the right metrics and collecting the metric data. Continuous improvement requires continuous change, measurement, and iteration. What’s more, the agreed-upon metrics drive this cycle, but also create insights for the broader organization.


Data-Driven DevOps

A successful DevOps transformation focuses on a couple areas. To start, a culture change is needed between development and operations teams. Another core tenant of DevOps is measurement. In order to accomplish a true DevOps transformation, it’s important to measure the current situation and regularly review metrics which indicate improvement or degradation. One of the core tenants of DevOps is measurement, and using said measurements as facts when driving decision making. These metrics should span several areas which may have been considered disjointed in the past.

To help DevOps teams think of possible metrics and how these metrics relate to key initiatives, Gartner recently released this useful metrics pyramid for DevOps:


Many of these metrics span development, operations, and most importantly – the business. They measure efficiency, quality, and velocity. However, Gartner points out that the hardest part is often defining what we can collect, take action upon, audit, and use to drive a lifecycle.

The second challenge (which Gartner does not discuss) is how these metrics should be linked together to offer meaningful insights. If the metrics do not allow linkage between a release and business performance, attribution gaps remain. And unfortunately, many enterprises today analyze metrics that have a lack of linkage or relationship between them.

To help with these relationships, context is critical. Without context, metrics can be open to interpretation, especially as you move up the Gartner pyramid. So it’s crucial to be able to link metrics together and attribute earnings or cash flow with a release or change that represents improvements in the application.

Additionally, metrics should be able to drive visibility inside the application without creating an additional burden for developers. With automated instrumentation, metric data can be produced consistently and comprehensively across all teams. This is extremely beneficial as many teams have different ways of collecting data, which can traditionally lead to inconsistencies. Consistent measurements should always be obtained from the application components and desired business outcomes of the application.

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New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

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Why Metrics Must Guide Your DevOps Initiative

Jonah Kowall

Metrics-oriented thinking is key to continuous improvement – and a core tenant of any agile or DevOps philosophy. Metrics are factual and once agreed upon, these facts are used to drive discussions and methods. They also allow for a collaborative effort to execute decisions that contribute towards business outcomes.

DevOps, although becoming a commonly used job title, is not a role or person and there is no playbook or rule set to follow. Instead, DevOps is a philosophy which spans people, process, and technology. The goal is releasing better software more rapidly, and keeping said software up and running by joining development and operational responsibilities together.

Additionally, DevOps aims to improve business outcomes, but there are challenges in selecting the right metrics and collecting the metric data. Continuous improvement requires continuous change, measurement, and iteration. What’s more, the agreed-upon metrics drive this cycle, but also create insights for the broader organization.


Data-Driven DevOps

A successful DevOps transformation focuses on a couple areas. To start, a culture change is needed between development and operations teams. Another core tenant of DevOps is measurement. In order to accomplish a true DevOps transformation, it’s important to measure the current situation and regularly review metrics which indicate improvement or degradation. One of the core tenants of DevOps is measurement, and using said measurements as facts when driving decision making. These metrics should span several areas which may have been considered disjointed in the past.

To help DevOps teams think of possible metrics and how these metrics relate to key initiatives, Gartner recently released this useful metrics pyramid for DevOps:


Many of these metrics span development, operations, and most importantly – the business. They measure efficiency, quality, and velocity. However, Gartner points out that the hardest part is often defining what we can collect, take action upon, audit, and use to drive a lifecycle.

The second challenge (which Gartner does not discuss) is how these metrics should be linked together to offer meaningful insights. If the metrics do not allow linkage between a release and business performance, attribution gaps remain. And unfortunately, many enterprises today analyze metrics that have a lack of linkage or relationship between them.

To help with these relationships, context is critical. Without context, metrics can be open to interpretation, especially as you move up the Gartner pyramid. So it’s crucial to be able to link metrics together and attribute earnings or cash flow with a release or change that represents improvements in the application.

Additionally, metrics should be able to drive visibility inside the application without creating an additional burden for developers. With automated instrumentation, metric data can be produced consistently and comprehensively across all teams. This is extremely beneficial as many teams have different ways of collecting data, which can traditionally lead to inconsistencies. Consistent measurements should always be obtained from the application components and desired business outcomes of the application.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...