Standardize and automate DORA benchmarks

Before getting started on any use case, it is crucial to import your services, resources, infrastructure, and other entities, and to have clear visibility into the ownership of your entities.

Connecting your entities to Cortex establishes a single source of truth across your engineering organization. It enables the ability to track progress via Scorecards, automate Workflows, and gain insights from Eng Intelligence.

Setting ownership of entities ensures that every service and system is clearly linked to accountable teams or individuals, enabling faster incident response, reducing handoff friction, and making it possible to enforce standards consistently.

The more data you have available, the more actionable and insightful your Scorecards can be.

Relevant integrations

Cortex calculates your DORA metrics by connecting directly to your delivery and incident management tools.

To focus on DORA metric improvements, configure integrations in the following categories:

• Version control: Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab

  • Cortex pulls cycle time and other PR-related metrics from version control integrations.

• Deploys: Add deploy data to Cortex via the deploys API

  • This powers the metrics for deployment frequency and change failure rate.

• Incidents: PagerDuty

  • Cortex pulls incident metrics, like incident frequency and MTTR, from PagerDuty.

• Custom metrics

  • If you use internal tools, configure custom metrics to ensure you are tracking events that impact DORA metrics

To increase efficiency across your processes, we also recommend that you integrate with other tools in your ecosystem. While these integrations don't populate your DORA Dashboard, they do contribute to ensuring reliability and quality in your software processes:

• Project management: GitHub, Jira, Azure DevOps, ClickUp

  • Track incidents and bugs, allowing you to collaborate with your team and speed up resolution times

• Code quality and security: Checkmarx, Codecov, Mend, Snyk, SonarQube, Veracode, Wiz

  • Enforce code coverage, vulnerability scanning, and other quality measures

Cortex also recommends linking to runbooks and documentation for your entities, ensuring your users have access to critical information when solving an incident.

With your data in Cortex, you have a jumping-off point to start measuring DORA metrics and driving improvements.

Use Eng Intelligence features — DORA dashboard, Velocity Dashboard, and Metrics Explorer — to surface and track key engineering metrics related to the software development lifecycle.

Review trends across the key DORA metrics to understand your team's baseline performance levels and use this information to identify areas where teams are not meeting standards. Launch Scorecards to drive broader changes (e.g., set standards and improve all DORA metrics) and Initiatives to drive targeted change (e.g., an Initiative that aims to improve MTTR over the next two months.)

Configure custom metrics

If your organization already tracks DORA-related metrics or other delivery KPIs through unsupported tools or internal systems, you can send that data into Cortex as custom metrics.

Scorecards automate the process of checking whether services meet criteria such as ownership, on-call coverage, runbooks, monitoring, and security requirements.

Cortex's DORA Operational Readiness template includes a set of predefined rules which can be customized based on your organization's requirements and goals. It is based on the established DORA standards of performance. The Scorecard is structured into four levels, with each representing increasingly higher standards against DORA benchmarks.

Step 2.1: Create the Scorecard and configure the basics

1. On the Scorecards page in your workspace, click Create Scorecard.

2. On the DORA Operational Readiness template, click Use.

   

1. Configure basic settings, including the Scorecard's name, unique identifier, description, and more.

   1. Learn about configuring the basic settings in the Creating a Scorecard documentation.

Step 2.2: Review and modify the rules

While Cortex's template is based on DORA standards, you may want to adjust the rules based on how your organization prioritizes standards and requirements. You can reorder, delete, and edit rules, you can add more rules to a level, and you can assign more points to a rule to signify its importance.

The Scorecard template contains rules that enforce increasingly higher DORA standards in each level, such as:

• MTTR less than 12 hours in the "Established" level and less than 60 minutes in the "Elite" level

• Change failure rate less than 30% in the "Established" level and less than 10% in the "Elite" level

When adding or changing the template rules, you can select from a list of available pre-built rules. Behind each rule is a Cortex Query Language (CQL) query; you can also write your own queries to further refine your rules.

Cortex MCP can significantly help during an incident by providing instant, conversational access to critical service and team information directly from your MCP client. This more efficient process can have a direct effect on reducing your MTTR.

Cortex MCP supports incident response by providing:

• Real-time, structured answers: Ask questions like "Who is on call for backend-server?" or "Give me all the details for parser-service." MCP fetches the data in real time from Cortex's API, ensuring accurate and up-to-date information about service health, ownership, and operational readiness.

• Actionable recommendations: MCP can suggest next steps or remediation ideas based on Scorecard and Initiative data, helping you identify and address gaps in incident response.