Launch: GitHub Actions Analytics

Most engineering teams today are stuck piecing together CI metrics from a bunch of different places: GitHub's UI, expensive monitoring tools, cloud dashboards, and scattered logs. It's a pain just to answer basic questions about your pipelines and build systems. We wanted to fix that by building analytics that actually makes sense and helps teams understand what's happening in their CI.

Our journey started with providing compute and caching primitives that make CI faster and cheaper. But we also realize that that isn't the whole story - teams also need to spot those pernicious CI issues that gradually eat away at productivity. That's why we've built analytics that gives you a clear picture of your CI health and helps you catch problems before they become headaches.

The next iteration

We've just shipped a new version of our CI analytics that makes it way easier to see what's going on in your pipelines. The interface is straightforward - you can sort and filter by the metrics that matter to you, toggle between current stats and historical trends, and zoom in from org-wide views down to specific repos. However, the breadth of questions these simple primitives allow you to answer is quite incredible. Here's a non-exhaustive list of questions you can now answer with Blacksmith:

Have any of my pipelines significantly slowed down in the last week?
Has job foo become flakier over time? Did it become flakier after we moved it to a smaller runner type?
Which repositories are we spending most of our CI budget on?
Does job foo have a tendency to time out after it has run for a while, or does it fail early on?

Talk is cheap

Here's a real example of how this helps. Say you're checking your CI metrics on Monday morning and notice something off - your build failure rate has jumped 15% in the last week.

Using our organization overview, you can quickly figure out which repos are causing trouble. You might find that most failures are coming from one repository. Click into that repo's workflow history, and you could discover that a specific test suite started acting up right after a dependency update.

What used to take hours of digging through different tools now takes minutes to figure out. That's exactly what we built these analytics for - helping you catch and fix issues before they become real problems.

[TODO: ADD VIDEO HERE]

Such analyses can be performed at the granularity of both jobs or workflows, so you can identify regressions in overall pipeline graphs in much the same way as shown above.

What's next

If you're already using Blacksmith, these analytics are available in your dashboard today. For new users, it's still just a one-line change to your workflows. Email us at hello@blacksmith.sh for a demo.

This is just the beginning. We're building tools on top of the analytics to help companies set monitors on their critical pipelines, and to help our users go even deeper in identifying the root cause of regressions.

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Launch: GitHub Actions Analytics

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