Zhivko Todorov
ALL CASE STUDIES

CASE 160 · IVY · 2024

DORAMETRICSOBSERVABILITYENGINEERING PRODUCTIVITY

DORA metrics, computed from systems engineering already uses.

A fintech CTO wanted DORA metrics — deploy frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate — without standing up a separate observability vendor. We built the dashboard from GitHub Actions, CloudWatch, and PagerDuty data the team was already producing.

INDUSTRY

Fintech

DOMAIN

PLATFORM

DELIVERED

2024

STACK

GITHUB ACTIONS·CLOUDWATCH METRICS·PAGERDUTY API·LAMBDA (ETL)·GRAFANA·DYNAMODB

RESULTS

What changed, by the numbers.

METRICS PUBLISHED

4 DORA + 6 CUSTOM

CTO DASHBOARD

DATA-PIPELINE COST

< $200 / mo

AWS-NATIVE

WEEKLY UPDATE LAG

< 1h

AGAINST EVENT TIME

BENCHMARK POSITION

HIGH PERFORMER

PER ACCELERATE

HOW IT WENT

The CTO had been asked for DORA metrics by the board. The internal-platform team had been pricing observability vendors and finding the cheapest option at $24k/year — for metrics the company already had in raw form across three systems.

A Lambda pipeline pulled GitHub Actions workflow runs (deploys), CloudWatch metric data (production health), and PagerDuty incidents (MTTR), normalised them into a DynamoDB table, and rendered Grafana dashboards. Custom metrics extended the four DORA basics with team-level breakdowns the CTO valued.

Pipeline cost steady-state under $200/month. Metrics update inside an hour of the underlying event. The board got their dashboard; the company classifies as a "high performer" by the DORA Accelerate framework. The team’s engineering retros now reference the deploy-frequency trendline.

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