DORA Metrics 2026

Deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate.

The four DORA metrics

Deploy frequency: how often production deploys happen.

Lead time for changes: commit to production.

Change failure rate: percent of deploys that cause incidents.

Mean time to restore: how fast recovery happens.

Performance levels

Elite: deploy multiple times per day, lead time under 1 day, CFR 0-15%, MTTR under 1 hour.

High: weekly to daily, lead time 1 day to 1 week, CFR 0-15%, MTTR under 1 day.

Medium: weekly to monthly. Low: less than monthly.

Measure honestly

Pull from CI/CD and incident tooling, not surveys. Self-reported numbers drift up.

Per-service measurements; not org-wide aggregates that hide problems.

Exclude trivial deploys if you exclude them consistently. Be transparent about the methodology.

Levers for improvement

Lead time: trunk-based dev, smaller PRs, faster CI.

Frequency: feature flags, automated approvals, decoupled deploys.

CFR: better tests, canary deploys, automated rollback.

MTTR: runbooks, observability, on-call training.

How to use DORA in 2026

Pick one metric to improve per quarter. Don't optimize all four at once.

Trend matters more than absolute numbers. Quarterly improvement is the signal.

Don't game the metrics. A team optimizing CFR by hiding incidents loses trust.