OpsLevel

🤚 DORA metrics alone won't cut it. DORA metrics are a great start, but they’re just one piece of the puzzle. To drive meaningful, sustainable improvements, engineering leaders must look beyond deployment speed and lead time. As Eli Daniel shared on a previous podcast episode; just because the metrics are there doesn't make them useful. 🌶️ Here’s how to go beyond DORA: 1️⃣ Combine Data with Developer Sentiment Metrics don’t tell the full story. Pair them with feedback to uncover hidden challenges. Ask: Are developers satisfied with their tools? What’s slowing them down? 2️⃣ Align Metrics to Business Outcomes Shipping faster is meaningless if it doesn’t solve customer problems. Focus on: Impacting revenue, retention, and satisfaction. 3️⃣ Contextualize Productivity Global metrics miss nuances. Track specifics like code review times and root causes of incidents to drive real improvement. 4️⃣ Start Conversations, Not Conclusions Metrics should spark dialogue: • Why are lead times increasing? • What’s causing deployment variance across teams? DORA metrics are valuable—but they’re only part of the story. Expand your approach, and gain the clarity to solve real challenges.

"A lot of folks who stand DORA metrics up quickly realize, wait a minute, this isn't really capturing the signal." One of the many insights that Abi Noda, CEO & Co-Founder at DX shared with us last month in an exclusive fireside chat. Abi and the team at DX have worked with top-tier engineering orgs like Dropbox, Etsy, and Brex to find the data that actually matters. Head to the link in the comments to watch the entire discussion on-demand.

YAML might seem like the easy choice for managing your service catalog, but is it really the ✨ best ✨ one? Here’s the truth: YAML often leads to hidden costs and increased complexity for your team. When your catalog info is scattered across Git repos or tucked into subdirectories, you create a fragmented, distributed database that’s hard to maintain and even harder to trust. You need a centralized, authoritative source for your catalog that syncs seamlessly with your existing tools, like Kubernetes and Git. No more YAML sprawl. No more confusion over what’s authoritative. Just a single, reliable place for your team to find what they need. Want to simplify and improve your software catalog? Let’s talk.

Truly effective engineering leaders are leveraging technology that does two things: 1️⃣ Gives developers autonomy by removing operational roadblocks 2️⃣ Improves software maturity and standards without slowing people down This is where an internal developer portal comes into play. Hear how HUDL, a long-time OpsLevel customer, runs plays with OpsLevel to increase ownership, improve standards, and help the business get more done.

Maintaining Backstage is painful, to say the least. Recently, OpsLevel CTO Kenneth Rose and Senior Developer Mark upgraded our internal Backstage instance, which we use to test our own Backstage plugins. Even with a relatively “vanilla” setup, the process revealed just how resource-intensive maintaining Backstage can be. At OpsLevel, we believe your time is better-spent shipping software—not maintaining infrastructure. Get the full story (link in comments) about the pain of upgrading Backstage.

Software complexity can kill the effectiveness of your engineering team. That's the pain that John Laban felt as the first engineer at PagerDuty, and what drove him to build OpsLevel alongside Kenneth Rose. Hear the origin story of OpsLevel and how we're helping teams of all sizes wrangle their complex infrastructure and empower developers to move faster on their own. Join NYSE Wired and SiliconANGLE & theCUBE as they dive into OpsLevel's history and how we help customers like Hootsuite, Duolingo, Keller Williams, and Nerdwallet scale service ownership across complex environments. 👉 Watch the entire interview today at 1 pm ET (cal link in comments)

We think of Service Maturity as a walk, run, sprint journey. Before you can start improving, you must understand your current state. This is where a service maturity assessment comes in. A service maturity assessment helps you gauge where each of your services sits on this spectrum, from nascent (just starting) to optimized (meeting the highest standards in every category). Our guide provides tactical steps to perform a service maturity assessment so you can start your journey toward optimized standards. 👉 Get the guide: https://lnkd.in/enteJ9Je

Did you miss the Fireside Chat with DX's Abi Noda? We talked about all things developer effectiveness including: 👉 Culture of continuous improvement is key 👉 Insights + the right tools can make a big difference in efficiency 👉 It's probably too early to tell the overall impact of GenAI tools The entire recording is available at the link in comments.

Tomorrow, we're hosting a 🔥 fireside chat with Abi Noda, CEO and Co-Founder at DX. Kenneth Rose and Abi will discuss productivity, collaboration, and developer experience. Join us live (or register to get the recording afterward) and hear about: 👉 DORA vs SPACE, what should you use? 👉 How are companies like Toast, Dropbox, and Amplitude solving the productivity problem? 👉 What are the biggest misconceptions about productivity metrics? ...and more! We'll even save time for live Q&A so you can get your questions answered in real time. RSVP for the fireside chat: https://lnkd.in/ejNBGS-W

🌐 Global standards aren't always the most popular way to build software, but they can mean the difference between calm and chaos when scaling. Chris Evans from 🔥 incident.io shares his experience going from a couple hundred to thousands of microservices and how optimizing for global standards was key to the organization's success. Miss the live panel? Catch the recording (link in comments)