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How to use GitLab tools for continuous delivery GitLab

The next image shows a New Relic dashboard with some of the GitLab metrics you’ll be able to see. Failure at this stage exposes issues you didn’t conceive of when writing the code. The aim of this stage is to give engineers feedback quickly, while the cause of the problem is fresh in their minds, so their flow state won’t be thrown off course. Pipelines are generally executed automatically and don’t need any intervention once they are created.

Deploy freeze windows protect the production environment by specifying who is allowed to deploy to the environment. Assigning specific roles and responsibilities streamlines the approval gates and release process. Now we are proud to introduce a different kind of integration for Gitlab — a brand new observability integration that will help you monitor the system itself. Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.

A beginner’s guide to continuous integration

Hence, monitoring the CI/CD pipelines can help in improving the overall performance of your software delivery process. A pipeline is the lead component of continuous integration, delivery, and deployment. It drives software development through building, testing and deploying code in stages. Pipelines are comprised of jobs, which define what will be done, such as compiling or testing code, as well as stages that spell out when to run the jobs. An example would be running tests after stages that compile the code.

gitlab pipeline monitoring

Connect any or all supported services to Grafana, and start exploring your data now. Again, this list fails to capture how many tools are actually out there. That’s why I’ll repeat a few tools here from the CI tools list. There are more CI tools, but I wanted to keep the list short with the tools I’ve personally used. Pprof endpoints will be available via an embedded HTTP server on /debug/pprof/
path. Knowing how the pipeline ran historically would be very helpful as it would allow us to know when it broke so that we could diagnose the source of the problem.

Collecting the metrics

For problems setting up or using this feature (depending on your GitLab
subscription).

While the application is running in production, track how the release is performing and quickly identify and troubleshoot any production issues. One way is to access the “Monitoring” feature for a specific environment to track system and application metrics, such as system and pod memory usage, and the number of cores used. The monitoring tracking includes markers (small rocket icon) when updates were introduced to the environment, so that fluctuations in the metrics can be correlated to a specific update.

Speed up API and microservices delivery with Microcks and GitLab – Part 1

Finally, it will show the status from the most recent build in master
or the branch you have specified. We cannot stress enough the importance of monitoring your CI/CD pipeline. There are plenty of other ways to do it, but using Prometheus is certainly application performance monitoring ci cd the path of least resistance. This may simply be because it helps you monitor other workloads running in your Kubernetes clusters. You can also aggregate metrics from Prometheus instances running in different clusters by using Thanos.

gitlab pipeline monitoring

A project’s audit events dashboard will record what user introduced a feature flag. The production environment dashboards shows all updates applied to the environment. Release managers can also access the environments dashboard to provide a cross-project, environment-based view that lets you see the big picture of what is happening in each environment. To check the running application for integrity, you can click on the “Open live environment” button. Issues are a fundamental tool in GitLab, and include many components to help users communication information about product problems, new features, and more. Downloading and initializing Docker images can be a large part of the overall runtime
of jobs.

Monitoring CI/CD Pipelines

CI/CD falls under DevOps (the joining of development and operations teams) and combines the practices of continuous integration and continuous delivery. With a CI/CD pipeline, development teams can make changes to code that are then automatically tested and pushed out for delivery and deployment. Get CI/CD right and downtime is minimized and code releases happen faster.

gitlab pipeline monitoring

The good news is, regardless of how you get there, GitLab offers a solution that allows companies to modernize their release process at their own pace and in their own way. Variables marked as protected are accessible to jobs that run in pipelines for protected branches. Only assign users the right to merge to protected branches if they have permission to access sensitive information like deployment credentials and tokens. You can set a pipeline to start whenever you commit a new change to a branch—this pipeline type is known as a branch pipeline.

Why GitLab access tokens now have lifetime limits

CI processes should have a version control system that tracks changes so you know the version of the code used. A secondary advantage is that you don’t have to wait long for answers and can, if necessary, fix bugs and security issues while the topic is still fresh in your mind. When a runner picks a pipeline job, GitLab provides that job’s metadata.

  • All these dashboards offer operations insights that are necessary to understand how a release is performing in production and quickly identify and troubleshoot any production issues.
  • CatLight will show a notification when the build pipeline starts, succeeds, or fails.
  • If a pipeline fails frequently, look for common patterns in failed jobs, such as randomly failing unit tests, insufficient test coverage, and failed tests that slow down feedback.
  • Check the runtimes of jobs and stages to identify pipeline inefficiencies.

Once you have dashboards for Jenkins and ArgoCD Grafana, it is fairly easy to set-up alerts for them. Alternatively, you can also configure alerts in a Prometheus rules file and deliver them using Alertmanager. There is plenty of info on the dashboard for both the application health and ArgoCD health.

How the integration works

In this section, we’ll learn to write a customized exporter to retrieve total branch count in the project . We’ll use Python Libraries “Python-Gitlab” to fetch Gitlab data and “Prometheus_Client” to convert the data into OpenMetrics. In this step , we’ll create docker containers to set up our Gitlab exporters(third-party and Customized) , Prometheus , and Grafana. The following configuration defines the different GitLab files to track and ship into ELK. I’ve defined a prospector for each log type so I can add custom fields to each.

The result is that you get to decide what works best, and you can automate it as part of your CI/CD pipeline. This phase includes testing as well where we can test with different approaches in the code. These dashboards help you preempt out-of-compliance scenarios to avoid penalties. They also streamline audits, provide an opportunity to optimize cost, and lower risk of unscheduled production outages. Check security and compliance-related items of the project by visiting the Security dashboard.

For instance, your project could have a separate tool or website. You can use a DAG to define the relationship between the jobs—GitLab will execute these jobs as quickly as possible rather than waiting for each stage to finish. “Too many Redis client exceptions during to requests to Redis instance cache.” “Too many Redis client exceptions during the requests to Redis instance cache.”

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