The DRIVE pillars

What DRIVE measures

DRIVE covers five dimensions of engineering health. Together, they give a complete picture of how an engineering organization is performing, not just how fast it's generating code.

1

Delivery

Are we shipping fast, and is it sustainable?

Critical metrics: deploy frequency, lead time for changes, on-call pager volume

2

Reliability

Are we delivering on our promises to customers?

Critical metrics: Functional SLO status (binary pass/fail), Sev0 and Sev1 incident count

3

Initiatives

Are our most important eng investments making progress?

Critical metrics: tier 1 initiative milestone completion rate, OpEx action item completion rate

4

Vigilance

Is security risk accumulating?

Critical metrics: open critical and high fixable CVEs, assets below the minimum compliance security bar, orphaned assets

5

Efficiency

Are we spending time and money effectively?

Critical metrics: cloud spend versus budget, internal AI and LLM token costs, percentage of capacity spent on innovation

How Cortex operationalizes DRIVE

Cortex gives you three surfaces for DRIVE:

• Data ingestion - Connect integrations and push custom metrics aligned to each DRIVE pillar, like deploy frequency, incident counts, initiative completion rates, vulnerability data, and AI spend.

• Scorecard - A DRIVE Framework Scorecard template you can alter to match your organization's standards. Rules evaluate automatically against live data, without manual data entry or stale reports

• Eng Intelligence dashboards - Visualize your DRIVE metrics in custom dashboards for leadership reviews and trend tracking.

Connect your data

Ingest your services and infrastructure and connect integrations for version control, deploys, incidents, security scanning, and cloud cost data. For signals that don't come from a native integration (initiative completion rates, internal cost systems, custom deploy pipelines, etc) push that data into Cortex as custom metrics via the API. See Setting up custom data for DRIVE

Configure the DRIVE Scorecard

Start from the DRIVE Framework Scorecard template and adjust thresholds to match your organization's standards. The default rules are a strong starting point for most teams. You can reference both integration and custom metrics in your Scorecard rules. See DRIVE Scorecard rules

Build your Eng Intelligence dashboards

Use Eng Intelligence to build custom dashboards that visualize your DRIVE metrics. These give leaders a live view of organizational health going into every OpEx review. See Building a custom DRIVE dashboard

Run your OpEx reviews against live data

Use the Scorecard and dashboards as the backbone of your recurring engineering leadership reviews. Bronze/Silver/Gold levels give leaders an instant read on which teams need attention, without having to dig through raw metrics.

Next steps

Not sure where to start? Take the DRIVE maturity assessment

The DRIVE maturity assessment takes 5 minutes and gives you a breakdown of your org's strengths, risk areas, and the highest-impact gaps to close.

Ready to set up DRIVE in Cortex?

Start here by importing your services and connecting your integrations, then create a Scorecard using the DRIVE Framework template. Adjust the thresholds to match your organization's standards, and you'll have live DRIVE data in your next leadership review.