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.