DORA instrumentation checklist

1. Document definitions for deploy, incident, service boundary, and environments; secure leadership agreement.
2. Configure SCM hooks or API jobs to export commit metadata with author, timestamp, branch, and service tags.
3. Enable CI/CD event exports (pipelines, deploys) including status, duration, environment, and artifact references.
4. Integrate incident management data, mapping ticket IDs to services and capturing start/end timestamps.
5. Normalize identifiers across datasets (service ID, environment, change ID) in a central warehouse or data lake.
6. Build automated transformations to calculate deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR on a scheduled cadence.
7. Publish a shared dashboard with filters by team/product, include annotations, and document data freshness expectations.
8. Establish recurring review meetings where stakeholders inspect metrics, capture improvement experiments, and assign owners.
9. Audit data quality quarterly—spot-check samples, review definitions, and update documentation as tooling evolves.

Prerequisites

• Access to SCM, CI/CD, and incident management APIs with required scopes.
• Analytics or data platform capable of storing and transforming event data.

Pitfalls

• Leaving manual steps in the data pipeline, leading to drift or stale metrics.
• Counting staging deployments or config toggles inconsistently across teams.
• Publishing dashboards without assigning owners for maintenance and interpretation.

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