Top CI Metrics Platform Engineering Leaders Should Track

Continuous Integration (CI) metrics are crucial for platform engineering leaders to enhance developer productivity, control costs, and ensure reliable software delivery. By tracking metrics such as build duration, queue time, success rates, and cost per build, organizations can transform raw CI data into actionable insights that drive business outcomes. Effective metric tracking helps identify productivity bottlenecks, optimize resource usage, and maintain security standards. Harness CI demonstrates this by delivering faster builds and enabling budget predictability through intelligent caching and optimized testing. Additionally, metrics like mean time to recovery and flaky test rates help teams address build failures and improve developer confidence. Standardizing pipeline metadata and automating metric collection are key steps towards operationalizing these insights, ensuring teams focus on metrics that reveal bottlenecks, control costs, and maintain pipeline reliability.