Continuous Delivery Indicators

This guide will help you install, configure and use the Continuous Delivery Indicators addon in your Jenkins X cluster.

This addon will automatically:

• collect metrics from cluster events and git events: pull requests, pipelines, releases, deployments, …
• store them in a PostgreSQL database
• expose Grafana dashboards to visualize Continuous Delivery Indicators

This is an example of a pre-defined dashboard to visualize Continuous Delivery Indicators for a single repository (application):

Installation

Note that this addon requires a running Grafana instance in your cluster, so you should install it first, using the platform observability guide.

Please follow the usual getting started guide for boot and helm 3 first.

Installing this addon is a 1 step operation: you need to edit the helmfiles/jx/helmfile.yaml file in your development environment git repository, so that it references the jxgh/cd-indicators chart, such as:

releases:
- chart: jxgh/cd-indicators
  name: cd-indicators
- chart: ...
...

Commit and push these changes, and after a few minutes you should see 2 new pods running in the jx namespace:

$ kubectl get pod -n jx
NAME                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cd-indicators-57f85df9fb-fltjp   1/1     Running   0          13m
cd-indicators-postgresql-0       1/1     Running   0          13m
...

Usage

This addon will also expose:

• a Grafana datasource for the embedded PostgreSQL database - named Indicators - in a Kubernetes Secret
• multiple Grafana dashboards - with the cd-indicators tag - in Kubernetes ConfigMaps

The Grafana instance will automatically find these new resources and use them. So if you go to your Grafana URL, you should now see a new datasource and new dashboards. Of course, it might take a few hours/days/weeks to get enough data to get nice-looking dashboards.

You can either:

• enrich the existing dashboards, and submit Pull Requests on the cd-indicators github repository so that everybody can benefit from your improvements
• or create your own dashboards. We recommend that you store them in a git repository, and publish them as ConfigMaps in your cluster - see the cd-indicators github repository for an example.

And because we’re re-using the same Grafana instance which already has the Prometheus (metrics) and Loki (logs) datasources, you can build dashboards combining data from all sources, to get a complete overview of your application and its lifecycle: development, build, release, deployment, runtime.

Configuration

The configuration is defined in a “values file” stored in the Jenkins X Version Stream.

If you want to change anything from the default configuration, you can either:

• submit a Pull Request if you believe this change is beneficial for everybody
• or create a new values file in your development environment git repositor: values/cd-indicators/values.yaml

You should at least configure the gitOwners, to ensure you will only collect metrics for your own repositories, and not for Jenkins X’s own applications - see the default values. In your values/cd-indicators/values.yaml file you can write:

config:
  gitOwners:
  - my_github_organization

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