dora

Measure, benchmark, and instrument DORA metrics for production engineering teams.

Mode: instrument

Add DORA event emission to a GitHub Actions workflow.

Steps:

1. Identify which events to capture:

   • Deploy event: triggered on successful deployment to a target environment
   • Incident open event: triggered by PagerDuty/OpsGenie webhook when an incident is created
   • Incident close event: triggered when the incident is resolved

2. Detect: does a Prometheus Pushgateway exist in the stack? If not, it must be deployed before instrumentation can work:

   kubectl get svc -A | grep pushgateway
   

   If absent, deploy via Helm before proceeding:

   helm upgrade --install prometheus-pushgateway prometheus-community/prometheus-pushgateway \
     --namespace monitoring \
     --create-namespace
   

3. Generate GitHub Actions steps for each event type:

   • Deploy event: push dora_deployment_timestamp and dora_lead_time_seconds to Pushgateway
   • Incident triggered (PagerDuty/OpsGenie webhook): push dora_incident_start_timestamp
   • Incident resolved: push dora_incident_duration_seconds and dora_incident_caused_by_deploy

4. Output: exact YAML to append to the existing workflow, using the Pushgateway job name convention job/dora/instance/<repo-owner_repo-name>. Sanitize owner/repo → owner_repo to avoid breaking Pushgateway path segments.

   Example deploy event step:

   - name: Push DORA deploy metrics
     if: success()
     env:
       PUSHGATEWAY_URL: ${{ secrets.PUSHGATEWAY_URL }}
       REPO: ${{ github.repository }}
     run: |
       DEPLOY_TS=$(date +%s)
       # Lead time from first commit in this batch — requires fetch-depth: 0 in checkout.
       FIRST_COMMIT_TS=$(git log --reverse --format="%ct" origin/main..HEAD | head -1)
       FIRST_COMMIT_TS=${FIRST_COMMIT_TS:-$DEPLOY_TS}
       LEAD_TIME=$((DEPLOY_TS - FIRST_COMMIT_TS))
       INSTANCE="${REPO//\//_}"
       cat <<EOF | curl --data-binary @- "${PUSHGATEWAY_URL}/metrics/job/dora/instance/${INSTANCE}"
       # TYPE dora_deployment_timestamp gauge
       dora_deployment_timestamp{repo="${REPO}",env="production"} ${DEPLOY_TS}
       # TYPE dora_lead_time_seconds gauge
       dora_lead_time_seconds{repo="${REPO}",env="production"} ${LEAD_TIME}
       EOF
   

5. Warn: Change Failure Rate requires incident source integration — a rate of 0% without incident data is a configuration gap, not a real metric. Never report 0% CFR without confirmed incident source connectivity.

Validation:

# Confirm Pushgateway received the metric
curl -s http://pushgateway:9091/metrics | grep dora_deployment_timestamp

# Confirm Prometheus scraped it (allow up to 1 scrape interval, default 15s)
curl -s 'http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query?query=dora_deployment_timestamp' \
  | jq '.data.result[0].value[1] // "not yet scraped — wait 15s and retry"'

Reference: references/dora.md → Open-source instrumentation pattern