Introducing Incidents API: Get a Handle on Interruptions With Our New Feature

Velocity’s Incidents API gives the most accurate data on interruptions so you can investigate why outages happen and work to improve your teams’ response.

Failures and outages happen, even to the highest performing engineering teams. These unplanned interruptions might require developers to stop what they’re working on and pivot to problem-solving. If left unresolved, incidents can slow down delivery and become a financial burden on organizations.

The key to avoiding significant interruptions caused by incidents is to collect real-time data and analyze incident trends over time. Digging into your team’s incident-related data can help you understand whether your processes are effective in identifying, diagnosing, and solving issues.

Sourcing Accurate Data

Code Climate Velocity’s new Incidents API allows users to send incident data to Velocity to calculate the two incident related DORA metrics, Change Failure and Mean Time to Recovery, to help leaders get a better handle on interruptions and understand how long it takes for a team or an application to get to resolution. This is in addition to our Jira incident source, which allows customers to set a board and/or issue type for Velocity to consider as an “incident.”

Through Velocity’s Incidents API, users can push incident data from any tool they use, like PagerDuty and Opsgenie, into Velocity to calculate incident metrics. Customers can configure Incidents on the Applications settings page in Velocity.

Putting Metrics Into Context

In Velocity's Analytics, users can view DORA metrics alongside other key engineering metrics — such as Change Failure Rate alongside Unreviewed PRs — and assess how incidents impact the team. By placing this data into context, leaders can get a more precise picture of team health and processes.

Failure in production and delays in new features can mean dissatisfied end-users, so the key is to find a balance between shipping code frequently and maintaining high code quality.

Defining Your Goals

The top performing engineering teams can claim these benchmarks when it comes to incident-related metrics:

• Mean Time to Recovery (referred to as Time to Restore Service by the DORA group) of less than one day

• Change Failure Rate between 0-15%

By focusing on these specific metrics and establishing goals for each, engineering leaders can redefine priorities and make real progress towards enhanced delivery and higher overall performance, and understand if your team is striking the right balance between the speed of development and ensuring the delivery of high quality code.

Why Velocity Calculations Are the Most Actionable

By pulling in actual customer incident and deploy data from Jira and other tools via our Incidents API, Velocity’s solution accurately calculates the four DORA metrics. Many EMPs rely on proxy data rather than true incident data, which can be inaccurate and error-prone. Actual incident data will give you a true understanding of your teams’ incident response health.

Speak with a Velocity product specialist and learn how to get a clear picture of your engineering practices through Velocity's Analytics module.