Phase 4 — Configure DORA Metrics (Optional)

LinearB Essentials can calculate DORA metrics if deployment and incident data are available. This phase explains how to configure release detection and incident tracking so these metrics can populate.

What Are DORA Metrics?

DORA metrics measure software delivery performance and are widely used by engineering teams to understand development speed, stability, and reliability.

LinearB supports the following DORA metrics:

• Deployment Frequency
• Lead Time for Changes
• Change Failure Rate (CFR)
• Mean Time to Restore (MTTR)

To calculate these metrics, LinearB must detect deployments and optionally track incidents.

Step 1 — Configure Release Detection

Release detection allows LinearB to identify when code changes are deployed to production. This is required for calculating Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes.

LinearB supports multiple release detection methods. Choose the method that best matches your deployment workflow.

Supported Release Detection Methods

• Release by Git Tag — Detect deployments when tagged commits are pushed.
• Release by Pull Request to a Deployment Branch — Detect deployments when PRs merge into branches like main or production.
• Release by Direct Merge — Detect deployments when commits merge directly into a deployment branch.
• Release by Deployment API — Report deployments directly from your CI/CD system.

To configure release detection:

1. Go to Company Settings → Advanced.
2. Scroll to the Release Detection section.
3. Select your preferred release detection method.
4. Save the configuration.

Expected result:

• LinearB begins detecting deployments
• Deployment Frequency and Lead Time metrics start populating

Step 2 — Configure Incident Tracking (Optional)

To calculate Change Failure Rate (CFR) and Mean Time to Restore (MTTR), LinearB must receive incident lifecycle data.

In Essentials, incident tracking is configured using the Incident API.

To configure incident tracking:

1. Generate a LinearB API token under Company Settings → API Tokens.
2. Go to Company Settings → Incident Detection.
3. Select API Integration.
4. Configure your incident management system to send incident events to the LinearB Incident API.

Typical incident management tools include:

• PagerDuty
• Opsgenie
• Custom incident systems

Incidents must include timestamps indicating when the incident started and when it was resolved.

For full configuration details, see the Incident API documentation .

How LinearB Connects PRs, Deployments, and Incidents

LinearB automatically correlates development activity with deployments and incidents.

• Pull requests are associated with commits.
• Deployments are detected based on your release configuration.
• If an incident occurs after a deployment, it may be associated with that release.

This relationship allows LinearB to calculate DORA metrics automatically without requiring manual mapping.

What Success Looks Like

• Deployments appear in LinearB
• Deployment Frequency and Lead Time metrics populate
• Optional incident tracking enables CFR and MTTR metrics