In this exercise we will create a build monitor to radiate vital build information and statistics
_____
As a learner you will be able to
- Create dashboards in Jenkins to display build status
- Seed Jenkins using DSL to create dashboards by default
Name of tool - short description and link to docs or website
This exercise begins cluster containing blah blah
The goal of this exercise is to introduce Build Monitors to radiate teams progress on Dashboards.
Create a new Dashboard for our Builds using the plugin above. Use Regex to add jobs to it. Use the BuildFail Analyser to add meaningful data to the reason for failures.
Use the pipeline views in OpenShift and Jenkins to produce dashboards that teams can use.
This is a fairly structured guide with references to exact filenames and sections of text to be added. Include pictures and code snippets where appropriate. Rule of thumb is learners are dumb.... so over describe why we're doing things
In this exercise we will create a new build monitor to show key information about our builds
On Jenkins home page; create a new view by hitting the plus icon on the home screen (should be beside the all above the jobs list)
Give the job a sensible name such as todolist-monitor and select Build Monitor View
On the configuration page; select Recurse in subfolders
Check the box to use Regular Expression and set the value to be something that should scrape our apps such as .*todolist.*
Finally; select Display committers and set the Failure Analyser to Description. This allows us to write regex for when fails occur in Jenkins and have the reasons plotted on the graph. For example; number of test scores or common compilation errors.
Save your configuration to see your Build Monitor!
Let's create another view for Jenkins using the Pipeline Aggregator View plugin. This view is great because it shows lots of valuable information in a clean; easy to visualise way. Create a new view called todolist-pipelines and select Pipeline Aggregator View
On the configure page; set the regex to todolist.*
Set the view to Only display last build for simplicity of the view.
Save your configuration to see your Build Monitor!
Explore the Jenkins Blue Ocean view for some additional monitors and views that make Jenkins look pretty!
In this exercise we will intentionally fail the build to capture some metrics about why it's failed and how we can tighten the feedback for future failures
Open the todolist-fe app in your favourite editor. In this exercise, we will fail a test and capture the message in the log and visualise it on a dashboard.
Open one of the tests you wrote in previous labs; for example tests/unit/vue-components/TodoItem.spec.js. Negate the test at the very bottom of the file by adding a .not to the expect() statement as shown below.javascript it("call makImportant when clicked", () => { const wrapper = mount(TodoItem, { methods, propsData: { todoItem: importantTodo } }); // TODO - test goes here! const input = wrapper.find(".important-flag"); input.trigger("click"); expect(methods.markImportant).not.toHaveBeenCalled(); }); });
Run your tests locally and you should see one failing test as shown below. Jenkins will have the same output so we can capture this as code!
The Test Suites: 1 failed, 11 passed, 12 total string can be coded into a regex. On Jenkins homepage; hit the Failure Cause Management nav on the left hand menu. On the page that loads; hit Create new.
Call the new Failure Cause jest-tests. Set the Description to be ${1,1} failed out of ${1,2}. The ${1,1} refers to the first capture group in a regex. Click Add indication > Build log. Set the Pattern to match for the test output we've seen in our test execution on the terminal using this regex .*Tests:.*(\d+) failed.*(\d+) total.*.
Our dashboards are set to show the Description field from the Build Fail Analyser. Run a build by checking in our failed tests and check the result on the Build Monitor created in the previous stepbash $ git add . $ git commit -m "TEST - failing build" $ git push 
We can save up these regex and inject them into the jenkins-s2i so the configuration is there the next time we launch and we don't have to code them up again. In enablement-ci-cd repo; the jenkins-s2i/configuration/build-failure-analyzer.xml already contains ones we've collected on previous residencies.
TODO - Add instructions for creating dashboards as part of s2i in Jenkins setup using DSL
enablement-ci-cd .....Ideas for go-getters. Advanced topic for doers to get on with if they finish early. These will usually not have a solution and are provided for additional scope.
Additional Alerting
- Add Slack integration to the Pipeline by setting up a WebHook to call the slack endpoint with Build Stats
- Add Twillio text integration to send you text messages when the build fails.
Additional Monitoring
- Explore the Application's FEK stack inside OpenShift
List of links or other reading that might be of use / reference for the exercise