The Jenkins Prometheus plugin exposes a Prometheus endpoint in Jenkins that allows Prometheus to collect Jenkins application metrics. The plugin is really just a wrapper around the Metrics plugin to expose JVM metrics through a REST endpoint that returns data in a format that Prometheus can understand. Communicating its value effectively to stakeholders is crucial for securing investment and organizational commitment. The goal is to make the abstract tangible and the technical relatable, all while building a compelling business case for CI/CD. It governs not just code but also configuration changes and dependencies, with diverse impacts on functionality, performance, and security. They also enhance security and streamline operational efficiency, making your development and deployment process resilient against unauthorized access and potential breaches.

The visualization of CI/CD pipelines as distributed traces in Elastic Observability provides
documentation and health indicators of all your pipelines. The Jenkins health dashboards provide insights on the build executions, the failures, the
provisioning of build agents, the active and idle workers, or the JVM health. An intensive, highly focused residency with Red Hat experts where you learn to use an agile methodology and open source tools to work on your enterprise’s business problems. Teams may also want to consider managed CI/CD tools, which are available from a variety of vendors. The major public cloud providers all offer CI/CD solutions, along with GitLab, CircleCI, Travis CI, Atlassian Bamboo, and many others. One of the best known open source tools for CI/CD is the automation server Jenkins.

Step 2: Index & Store Data in Elasticsearch (or OpenSearch)

Businesses can get software to market faster, test innovative new features or architectures while minimizing risk and cost, and effectively refine products over time. So, be sure to test for geographic variables as well as the more obvious continuous integration monitoring ones (like browser and operating system configurations). You can also use synthetic monitoring to compare how applications perform with and without the use of CDNs, which will also help you anticipate different types of user experiences.

The context propagation from CI pipelines (Jenkins job or pipeline) is passed to the Maven build
through the TRACEPARENT and TRACESTATE environment variables that match the W3C Trace Context specification. Therefore, everything that happens in the CI platform is also shown in the traces. The Errors overview screen provides a high-level view of the exceptions that CI builds catch. Similar errors are grouped to quickly see which ones are affecting your services
and allow you to take action to rectify them.

CI/CD health monitoring with the ELK Stack or OpenSearch

If you want to be successful with CI/CD, make continuous integration, delivery, and deployment your mantra as they are the cornerstones of software development practices. The goal of DevOps is to get software to users more quickly than traditional methods, and these development practices will help make that happen. The integration happens after a “git push,” usually to a master branch—more on this later. CI/CD tests and deploys code in environments, from where developers build code to where operations teams make applications publicly available.

However, it requires additional plugins for certain features, limited built-in security features, and potential performance issues with large pipelines. Jenkins is distributed as WAR files, native packages, installers, and Docker images and is available for free download. Security scanning tools at the code level (SAST and SCA tools) are handy for early vulnerability and error diagnostics but can produce a large number of false positives. Security scanning at the test level (DAST and IAST tools) requires the software to be built and running, which means errors are caught later in the pipeline where bug fixes are more time-consuming and costly. Select the best security scanning tools for the tasks at hand, and use those tools to automatically update the bug tracking system and automatically generate tickets for fast examination and remediation.

Deployment size

It could be a memory leak or high CPU usage in one of the machines or containers, or even in the JVM itself (in the case of Jenkins that is Java based). It could happen due to improper cleanup of previously run tests or tasks, or many other reasons. We all practice monitoring and observability in our Production environment. That’s how we know that our system runs well, that our environment is stable, and in case of issue – to root-cause and remediate quickly and efficiently.

Typically building a CI/CD pipeline consists of the following phases/stages. These are basic visualizations, but you should adapt and add to it according to your needs, environment and investigation process. It may even call for several dashboards for different personae with different monitoring needs or areas of responsibility. DevOps teams can’t know how well their CI/CD practices are going unless they measure them. Metrics play an important role in improving system performance and helping to identify where value can be added. They also provide a baseline for measuring the impact of any improvements made.

What are the stages of a CI/CD pipeline?

To figure out the average life cycle time, measure the development process phases. This metric will provide insight into what the overall development time is and any bottlenecks in the process. A robust CI/CD setup should effortlessly expand with your growing development team and project complexity. This means it can efficiently handle increased workloads as your software development efforts grow, maintaining productivity and efficiency.

Note that since 2021 Elasticsearch and Kibana are no longer open source, but you can use their open source fork OpenSearch to achieve the same with Apache2 license. As an open source enthusiast, I’ll demonstrate it with the popular open source stack, but the principles can be implemented on other equivalent tools of choice. A streamlined CI/CD process lets developers actually focus on what matters and not on the distractions of problem code, missed handoffs, production issues, and more. Infrastructure costs are critically important with cloud native development. Deploying and managing a CI/CD platform can result in big expenses if they are not kept in check. To determine how they will set their prices, cloud providers will consider what the cost is of network hardware, infrastructure maintenance, and labor.

Tekton: The Open Source, Kubernetes-native CI/CD Tools

If you need help setting up these metrics feel free to reach out to me through LinkedIn. Additionally, MetricFire can help you monitor your applications across various environments. Monitoring is extremely essential for any application stack, and you can get started with your monitoring using MetricFire’s free trial. Robust monitoring will not only help you meet SLAs for your application but also ensure a sound sleep for the operations and development teams. Validating a CI/CD pipeline involves numerous challenges and considerations from testing software features.

• A continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is a series of steps that must be performed in order to deliver a new version of software.
• Thanks to the oversight of at least one other person, it becomes much more likely that the dangerous code will get recognized and stopped rather than proceeding down the pipeline.
• CI is mainly a cultural shift, but some tools could help you to get the job done quickly.
• It is they who have the best insights about the products they are creating.
• A typical example is a middleware around an HTTP request that measures the time that has been spent producing a response as well as the information on both the request and response, such as status code and payloads.
• It builds code, runs tests, and securely deploys a brand new version of the application.

Browserstack can help with many requirements of the testing phase, like cross browser testing, visual testing, automating native/hybrid mobile apps, and many others. Test Data is one of the biggest challenges that companies have, where teams cannot carry out testing without the historical data that has been built. Unfortunately, it’s still one of the biggest challenges that companies are struggling with today. In the testing phase, it’s essential to focus on a continuous, consistent, faster feedback testing loop. It is important to build a test platform and framework and have the right testing tools that can easily integrate with the overall CI/CD pipeline to aid robust testing, a faster feedback loop, and drive product success.

Monitoring the CD Component (ArgoCD)

This blog post provides a great
overview of how all of these pieces work together. To inject the environment variables and service details, use custom credential types and assign the credentials to the Playbook template. This gives you the flexibility to reuse the endpoint details for Elastic APM and also standardize on custom fields for reporting purposes.

Time to fix tests

By using standard industry specifications, Tekton will work well with existing CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Jenkins X, Skaffold, Knative, and OpenShift. DevOps organizations are expected to improve performance without disrupting the business. Considering the increased dependence on automation technologies and a cultural change focused on rapid and continuous delivery cycles, DevOps organizations need consistency of performance across the SDLC pipeline. Agile development paradigms, such as DevOps and continuous deployment, embrace both operations and development roles. Developers must understand both deployment and operations, and take greater ownership of the software’s reliability and performance. Business and project leaders must foster and reinforce this attitude shift.

Keep Tools Updated

On the right hand side you can see the Gantt chart which visually shows the duration of each step, as well as which steps ran in parallel or sequentially. Let’s see how to visualize Jenkins jobs and pipeline executions as distributed traces, following the same 4-step flow. Once the data is in Elasticsearch, define reports and alerts on top of that data to automate as much as possible. For example, the DoD (developer on duty) should receive a daily start-of-day report to slack, to make sure nothing happened during the night that calls for his or her urgent attention. 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.