---
date: 2025-05-18
title: How quickly can you get back online?
permalink: /daily/2025/05/18/how-quickly-can-you-get-back-online
---

<p><a href="https://dora.dev/guides/dora-metrics-four-keys">The DORA metrics</a> are four key metrics used to indicate the velocity and stability of software development.</p><p>They are:</p><ul><li>Deployment frequency - how often you successfully releases to production.</li><li>Lead time for changes - the amount of time it takes for a commit to get into production.</li><li>Change failure rate - the percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.</li><li>Time to restore service - the amount of time it takes to recover from a failure in production.</li></ul><p>If you had an issue after a release to production, how long would it take you to recover?</p><p>If the amount of changes is small and it hasn't been long since the last release, it could be easy to revert the code change and re-deploy.</p><p>If it's been a while since the last release or the release contains large changes, this will be harder.</p><p>If you use feature flags, can you disable a flag and stop the code that's causing the issue?</p><p>What if you need to recreate the whole environment?</p><p>How old is your most recent backup? Have you verified the backup works and can be used to restore a database, the user-uploaded files or the whole environment?</p><p>A backup is only good if it is recent and can be restored. Otherwise, it's useless.</p><p>But, restoring from backups can take time and lose data, so this should be the last option.</p><p>Releasing small changes often and using tools like feature flags will help minimise the downtime from an issue and allow service to be restored as quickly as possible.</p>