Overview
Services represent the software components your teams build and operate. By defining services with delivery profiles, CompassHQ measures DORA metrics against your team’s stated delivery intent rather than arbitrary industry benchmarks.
Creating a Service
Services are created from the DORA metrics page (the main services view).
- Navigate to DORA in the left sidebar.
- Click the Add Service button (admin only).
- Fill in the service details:
- Name — a clear identifier for the component (e.g., “billing-api”, “checkout-frontend”).
- Description — what the service does.
- Target type — Web Service, Desktop, Mobile, CLI, or Package.
- Owning team — which team is responsible for this service.
- Configure the delivery profile (see below).
- Click Save.
Configuring Delivery Profiles
The delivery profile defines how your team intends to deliver this service. CompassHQ uses this to evaluate whether you’re meeting your own targets.
Delivery Model
Choose one of three delivery models:
- Continuous Deployment — Deploys go out as soon as code is merged. Primary metric: deployment frequency.
- Scheduled Release — Releases follow a planned cadence (weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc.). Primary metric: release hit rate.
- Event Driven — Releases are triggered by external events or milestones.
Intended Cadence
Set how often you intend to deploy or release: Continuous, Daily, Weekly, Biweekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Ad Hoc.
Metric Targets
Define your targets for each DORA metric:
- Expected deployments per week — your deployment frequency target.
- Expected lead time (hours) — how fast changes should reach production.
- Maximum acceptable failure rate — your change failure rate ceiling.
- Target MTTR (hours) — how quickly incidents should be resolved.
Additional Settings
- Stability sensitivity — Low, Medium, or High. Affects how incidents are weighted.
- Adoption model — Immediate, Auto Update, or User Initiated. Relevant for client-side software.
- Focus level — Active, Maintenance, or Deprioritized. Adjusts performance expectations.
Connecting GitHub
To automatically track deployments, PRs, and releases from GitHub:
- Ensure your organization has the GitHub App installed (see Connecting GitHub).
- Open the service and click Edit.
- In the GitHub integration section, select the repository associated with this service.
- Enable sync and configure any workflow filters if needed.
Best Practices
- Name services consistently. Use lowercase with hyphens (e.g., “user-auth-service”) for easy identification.
- One team per service. Each service should have a single owning team.
- Set realistic targets. Start with your current delivery pace and tighten targets gradually.
- Choose the right delivery model. Don’t force CD metrics on a team that ships monthly releases.