DevOps Metrics: From CI/CD Telemetry to Business KPIs

Abstract

Effective DevOps practices hinge on monitoring both technical delivery pipelines and business outcomes. This paper examines the evolution of DevOps metrics, beginning with CI/CD telemetry—including deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery—and expanding toward business-focused KPIs such as time-to-market, cost per feature, and customer satisfaction. Through a systematic literature review of pre-2017 sources, we trace how Continuous Integration and Delivery metrics were initially emphasized, and explore proposals for bridging these technical metrics with organizational performance indicators. We propose a unified framework that integrates telemetry with strategic business KPIs, enabling teams to measure agility, operational resilience, and business impact. A methodology is presented for collecting these metrics from CI/CD systems, operations logs, financial reports, and customer surveys, followed by analysis on how they correlate and guide continuous improvement. We illustrate advantages such as enhanced visibility across the value stream, improved alignment between technical activity and business goals, and data-driven decision making. Challenges include tool integration complexity, misinterpretation of vanity metrics, and misaligned incentives. A case study synthesizes simulated results, showing that combining both metric types helps predict customer satisfaction and accelerates value delivery. The paper concludes by offering design principles for metric dashboards that balance engineering precision with business relevance, and suggests future directions such as adopting value stream management, predictive analytics, and evolving cultural metrics.