Pipeline Downtime
Pipeline Downtime tracks the amount of time that continuous integration or deployment pipelines are unavailable, failing, or otherwise unable to process changes successfully. It reflects the reliability of your CI/CD infrastructure and its impact on engineering throughput.
Calculation
Downtime is typically calculated as the sum of time intervals when critical pipeline stages (e.g. build, test, deploy) are in a failed or degraded state across services or environments.
The metric is calculated as:
pipeline downtime = total time pipelines are nonfunctional or blocked per reporting period
Goals
Pipeline Downtime helps teams understand how often delivery is blocked due to automation or infrastructure issues. It answers questions like:
- Are engineers delayed waiting for broken builds or stuck deployments?
- How frequently do toolchain problems interrupt delivery?
- Are we investing enough in reliability and observability for critical automation?
Reducing pipeline downtime improves feedback loops, supports Flow Efficiency, and boosts overall engineering velocity.
Variations
Common segmentations include:
- By environment, such as staging vs production pipelines
- By team or service, highlighting impact across delivery units
- By failure type, such as configuration errors vs infra outages
- By time of day, revealing whether downtime clusters during off-hours or business hours
Some organizations also measure Build Failure Rate or Pipeline Success Rate as related metrics.
Limitations
Pipeline Downtime measures infrastructure availability—not developer behavior or delivery quality. It also depends on how downtime is defined. Transient build failures may not block delivery, while silent regressions could go untracked.
To improve observability and accountability, pair with:
| Complementary Metric | Why It’s Relevant |
|---|---|
| Pipeline Success Rate | Measures how often builds and deployments succeed vs fail |
| PR Cycle Time | Reveals how long delivery takes, including waiting on infrastructure |
| Flow Efficiency | Helps quantify how much of the delivery process is blocked or stalled |
Optimization
Reducing Pipeline Downtime strengthens delivery flow and team trust in automation:
- Add redundancy and failover options for build agents and runners
- Implement alerting on blocked jobs, so teams address issues quickly
- Use canary or blue/green pipelines, reducing downtime during deployment rollouts
- Automate pipeline validations on config changes to catch regressions early
- Perform Postmortems for high-severity pipeline incidents, identifying causes and mitigation steps
When pipelines are stable and fast, engineering teams stay in flow. Pipeline Downtime is a leading indicator of CI/CD health—and a critical input for teams seeking to scale delivery without compromise.
