Today, Ross Bruniges(@rossbruniges, fellow Mozillian) and I gave a presentation to our fellow Mozilla Foundation engineers about metrics and how to get the data for a data driven operation.

The purpose of our presentation was not to dictate or announce how we would do metrics, but to really begin a process and conversation.

Integrating metrics into your organization can be done in a painfully large number of ways, so part of the challenge we have and you may have is that there are so many options.  I think the trick here is to pick something, start small, lay out a basic framework(feel free to borrow ours ), and then have your developers play with that.  I have a feeling that in a week or two I’ll have engineers measuring their intake of coffee like the Etsy team. (Awesome write up and tool Etsy, thanks!)

Our conversation laid out a framework and a beginning toolset.  It defined the naming structure of statsd metrics, for example, and demonstrated a few streams we can tap into for metrics(for now). We used four layers of metrics to define what kind of metrics we would look to measure:  Organizational, Team, Product/App, and Operational

That will likely be very adaptable to many organizations, possibly replacing Product/App with Service or Department.  I’d be curious to hear what you are using for determining how you tie stats together to create metrics.

Leo Zhandovsky(@leozh, formerly DNC, now AWS Solutions Architect) and I give a brief talk about DevOps at the DNC and OFA campaign.
(Starts ~1hr55min)

Slides available below.

In November 2012, me and this group of guys (and another giant group of guys and gals not in the video) reelected the President of the United States.  Later that month, we were at AWS Re:Invent 2012 to talk about it.

In this video(from the top left):

Me, Leo Zhadanovsky, Jay Edwards, Scott VanDenplas

Ben Hagen, Brian Holcomb, Harper Reed

Moderator: Miles Ward