Stop building DORA dashboards from scratch.
Every SMB engineering team that takes DORA seriously ends up burning two engineer-weeks rebuilding the same four databases, the same five queries, and the same dashboard that we and a dozen other small teams have already built and refined. So we open-sourced ours.
This page describes the free Notion + Google Sheets DORA Metrics Calculator we use with our consulting clients. It computes all four DORA metrics — Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and MTTR — from your GitHub and PagerDuty data. Setup time: 15 minutes. Long-term operational cost: $0 incremental.
If you haven’t yet read How to Implement DORA Metrics in a 10-Person Team, start there — it explains why each metric matters before you start measuring.
What’s in the Template#
Four linked Notion databases plus a rollup dashboard:
| Component | What it tracks | Auto-populated from |
|---|---|---|
| Deploys | Every production deployment with timestamp + commit SHA | GitHub Actions webhook |
| PRs | Merged PRs with first-commit and merge timestamps | GitHub API (daily sync) |
| Incidents | Production incidents with open and resolve timestamps | PagerDuty webhook |
| Dashboard | Rolling 30-day P50/P85 for all four metrics | Notion formulas |
Plus a Google Sheets companion for visualizations (sparkline charts, trend lines, vertical and team comparisons) connected to the Notion data via API.
Why Notion (and Not DataDog or Honeycomb)?#
Three reasons specific to SMB context:
- Zero ramp time. Your team already uses Notion. They already understand databases, formulas, and rollups. There’s no new tool to learn.
- Editable benchmarks. When you outgrow our default thresholds, you edit a formula. With closed observability platforms, you wait for a feature request.
- Cost-proportionality. $0–$10/user/month vs. $20–$100/user/month for the alternatives. For a 10-person team that’s a $1,000+/month difference — enough to fund the engineer-time to act on the metrics instead of just collecting them.
15-Minute Setup#
The full step-by-step is in the HowTo schema above (and embedded in the template’s Setup page). The short version:
- Duplicate the public Notion template into your workspace.
- Generate a fine-grained GitHub Personal Access Token (read-only on the repo).
- Drop in our GitHub Actions workflow that posts deploy events to Notion.
- Wire PagerDuty’s generic webhook into the Incidents database.
- Verify with one test deploy and one test incident, then schedule the fortnightly review.
That’s it. By the end of week 1 you’ll have your first real Deployment Frequency number.
Three Ways We Use It with Clients#
1. Weekly Team Review (15 minutes)#
Open the dashboard, scan the four trend lines, ask: “What changed?” If a metric moved by more than 15% week-over-week, that’s a topic for the next retro. Most weeks: nothing changed. That’s a feature, not a bug.
2. Board-Prep Justification#
When a CEO asks “do we need to invest in CI?” the answer is no longer vibes. It’s: “Our Lead Time P85 is 4 days; cutting it to 2 would save us roughly X engineer-hours per month, which costs Y.” The Sheets companion has a pre-built ROI calculator for exactly this conversation.
3. Hiring Justification#
Want to hire a DevOps engineer? Pull the MTTR trend. If it’s flat at 4+ hours and growing with team size, that’s the business case in one chart.
When to Outgrow This Template#
You should graduate from the Notion calculator to a dedicated platform (LinearB, Swarmia, Sleuth, or a homegrown ClickHouse pipeline) when any of these become true:
- You have multiple production services with independent deploy cadences.
- You need per-team breakdowns rather than org-wide rollups.
- Your incident volume exceeds ~30/month and Notion’s database performance becomes a bottleneck.
- You need to correlate metrics with business outcomes (revenue, NPS) — Notion’s relations don’t scale here.
For most SMBs under 50 engineers, none of these are true. The calculator works.
Get the Template#
Duplicate the DORA Metrics Calculator template →
(Public read-only Notion page. Click “Duplicate” in the top-right to copy it into your workspace. No signup, no email gate.)
After setup, the next two clusters in this pillar will help you interpret the numbers: