Insights should distinguish between different job types
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Gareth Adams
While looking to see if anyone had requested this, I found a support request that someone had created talking about it, but no actual submission.
In Circle v2, developers can create workflows of different steps. Steps have different purposes and can take vastly different amounts of time. Each step of a workflow generates a separate build as the workflow is run.
However, inside insights, it's impossible to distinguish between the different types of step in a workflow, and therefore averages like "Median" become useless as a measure of build health.
The insights product should recognise workflow builds, and provide separate metrics (and possibly separate graphs) for each step.
CCI-I-876
K
Kunal Jain
We in the process of building Insights API which is going to provide this data. Please feel free to reach out to
beta@circleci.com
with your GitHub or Bitbucket organization name and we can add to the ongoing preview.K
Kunal Jain
As Nathan mentioned, we have started working on the APIs to provide this data. It would be wonderful if you can provide us feedback via 45 min video call on what CI metrics you are looking for. If you are interested, please fill this survey.
Thanks a lot!
M
Manuel Fittko
Hi Nathan,
thanks for the response - and great to hear that this is at least considered as an issue and that you are going to work on it in the near future.
Honestly though - and most likely everyone would agree - I think that the current setting for insights that takes job runtime as a metric is a bug and it could easily be changed to considering workflow timings instead. Would be great if you would agree too and sneak this into your short term bug fixes.
Thanks again,Manuel Fittko
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Nathan Dintenfass
It is certainly on the agenda, though it's not yet slated for work because it's part of a larger revamp of data access through our APIs. That work is still in early R&D, so it will take a bit before the fruits of those labors are in production use. In general, we have prioritized expanding and enriching our core developer features, so Insights hasn't gotten as much love in the past year,. The good news is you'll see renewed focus on features for extracting intelligence from our systems in the coming few quarters.
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Manuel Fittko
You are totally right, whats the point in summing up let's say jobs for integration tests which take 15 minutes versus a setup job which takes 30 seconds and showing a graph that displays the median of these jobs? That's totally pointless!!
It seems like the insights were a useful feature in CircleCI 1.0 but with the introduction of Workflows it totally needed an overhaul. Are you working on this or at least have this on your agenda, @CircleCI?