Platform Engineering Series | #3 DORA Metrics, SLOs and SRE - Site Reliability Engineering

Think of DORA metrics as your engineering fitness tracker - understanding the metrics and roles that keep your systems fast and reliable.

So you’ve heard the acronyms DORA, SLOs, SRE and maybe even nodded along in meetings, hoping no one would ask you to explain them. Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

In this episode of Platform Engineering in a Pill, we’re breaking them down without the jargon.

Let’s start with the basics.

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Welcome to the Platform Engineering Series, where I explain what platform engineering is, why platform teams exist and what they are solving. Along with all the jargon, such as DevOps, SRE, and SLOs, etc.

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What Are DORA Metrics?

DORA stands for DevOps Research and Assessment. It’s a research group (now part of Google) that studied hundreds of engineering teams to find out:
What makes some teams high-performing and others not?

Their findings were published in the book Accelerate, and they came up with four key metrics that indicate how healthy your software delivery process is:

1. Deployment Frequency – How often do you release to production?

2. Lead Time for Changes – How long does it take for code to go from commit to production?

3. Mean Time to Restore – How fast can you recover from a failure?

4. Change Failure Rate – How often do your releases break something?

These metrics don’t just help tech teams; they help align with business goals, like speed, resilience, and customer satisfaction.

Think of DORA metrics as your engineering fitness tracker. They won’t tell you what feature to build, but they’ll show if your team is fit enough to build and release it quickly and safely.

João Alves, Head of Engineering, Adevinta

What Are SLOs (Service Level Objectives)?