Platform Metrics

Platform metrics show whether platform work improves delivery, reliability, security, cost, and developer experience. Measure outcomes, not just platform activity.

Metric categories

Delivery metrics

Useful delivery metrics include:

Lead time from merge to production.
Deployment frequency.
Change failure rate.
Mean time to restore.
Rollback frequency.
Percentage of services using paved-road pipelines.

Reliability metrics

Reliability metrics should reflect user experience.

SLO attainment.
Error budget burn.
Incident frequency and severity.
Alert noise and actionability.
Restore test success.
Dependency failure impact.

Security metrics

Security metrics should track risk reduction and response.

Critical findings by age and exposure.
Mean time to remediate vulnerabilities.
Percentage of workloads using workload identity.
Secrets detected and rotated.
Policy exceptions by owner and expiry.
Artifact signing or attestation coverage.

Developer experience metrics

Developer experience is part of platform quality.

Time to create a new service.
Time from clone to first test.
Onboarding support requests.
Pipeline failure clarity.
Adoption rate for golden paths.
Developer satisfaction survey themes.

Watchouts

Metrics without owners become dashboards nobody uses.
Activity metrics can hide poor outcomes.
Comparing teams without context creates gaming and mistrust.
Use metrics to guide investment, not to punish teams.