What happens when your CI pipeline slows down without your knowledge?

The Continuous Integration (CI) concept aids in the development of DevOps and agile processes by reducing the build times and communication burden associated with code integration in the software development lifecycle. It enables every team member to take ownership of a new code modification from conception to release. Thanks to CI, organizations can scale their infrastructure, engineering teams, and codebases easier than before.

You develop, test, and package your product using a CI/CD pipeline. Therefore, the speed of your CI/CD pipeline directly affects the rate of software development; if it runs more quickly, productivity increases in parallel.

If it runs more quickly, productivity increases in parallel.

Why does a CI pipeline slow down?

The likelihood of experiencing a delayed CI process when delivering software continually increases with the complexity of the solution.

For instance, projects such as Keycloak runs 130+ workflows each day with 9 different workflows; it means more than 114 hours of work without parallelization. The more the contribution or development phase increases, Keycloak’s avg. workflow duration increase. Below is a chart of Keycloak CI, one of the 9 main workflows. This chart indicates Keycloak CI’s avg. run duration has jumped 50% in just 7 days. The increase is inevitable; however, taking control of it is possible.

An increase is inevitable, however, taking control of it is possible.

If Keycloak was not an open-source project, they would be paying 50% more on their monthly GitHub Actions bill in a week.

Rule-based GitHub Actions monitoring solution

Foresight Rules lets you set up robust and customizable policies for your workflows and tests. Receive notifications for fluctuations in key performance metrics as your workflow runs.

When you set your limits and thresholds using Rules, you’ll get a notification when your workflow run duration increases.

1. Go to Rules and click “Workflow run duration exceeds the limit set”

2. Enter your workflow and limit information and click “Create”. Below, we will get a mail notification when the Node.js CI workflow duration exceeds 3600 seconds.

You will get an email when your workflow duration increases, even if you are not paying attention. When the rule triggers, you can investigate the root cause of the increase by using Foresight Highlights, Process Traces, and Test Monitoring features.

Therefore, you won’t have to pay an unexpected GitHub bill.

TL;DR

Once the application scales up, it will be challenging to keep track of the system on our own. Because we can’t keep hiring engineers to monitor a system, that is when and why we need an effective warning system. Engineers can identify problems more quickly and provide clients with a flawless user experience with the aid of a dependable monitoring system.

For more information about configuring our integration, refer to our docs. Please submit your requests to support@runforesight.com or come to our Discord community and let’s chat. You can sign up for Foresight or see the live demo to see Foresight in action.