@c2l2c/backstage-plugin-dora-metrics

A Backstage frontend plugin that displays DORA metrics for catalog entities using the GitHub API.

Tracks the four key DORA metrics:

• Deployment Frequency — how often you deploy to a given branch
• Lead Time for Changes — time from first commit to merge
• Change Failure Rate — percentage of deployments causing failures (production only)
• MTTR — mean time to recovery from failures (production only)

Ratings are classified as Elite / High / Medium / Low per DORA research benchmarks.

Requirements

• Backstage v1.35+ (new frontend system)
• GitHub OAuth configured in your Backstage instance (the plugin uses githubAuthApi to call the GitHub REST API)
• Catalog entities annotated with github.com/project-slug: org/repo

Installation

# In your Backstage app workspace
yarn workspace app add @c2l2c/backstage-plugin-dora-metrics

Register the plugin

In packages/app/src/App.tsx:

import doraMetricsPlugin from '@c2l2c/backstage-plugin-dora-metrics/alpha';

// Add to your app's plugins array
const app = createApp({
  plugins: [doraMetricsPlugin],
  // ...
});

Configuration

Add to your app-config.yaml:

app:
  doraMetrics:
    # Lookback window in days (default: 30)
    collection:
      initialDays: 30

    # Define the environments / branches to track
    environments:
      - name: Production
        branch: main
        isProduction: true
        label: hotfix          # PR label for production failures (used for CFR/MTTR)
      - name: Staging
        branch: staging
        isProduction: false

    # Optional: override DORA benchmark targets
    targets:
      deploymentFrequency: 1   # deploys per day (Elite ≥ 1)
      leadTime: 24             # hours (Elite ≤ 24h)
      changeFailureRate: 5     # % (Elite ≤ 5%)
      mttr: 1                  # hours (Elite ≤ 1h)

How it works

The plugin reads the github.com/project-slug annotation from the catalog entity and calls the GitHub REST API (authenticated via the user's GitHub OAuth session) to fetch merged pull requests within the configured time window.

It calculates:

• Deployment Frequency: merged PRs per day to the target branch
• Lead Time: time from PR creation to merge
• CFR: percentage of PRs labelled as hotfixes (production environments only)
• MTTR: average time hotfix PRs were open (production environments only)

License

Apache-2.0