You know the old adage, 'out of sight, out of mind'? Like it or not, sometimes the state of the build on CI is forgotten about, and if you can't see the current state without going looking for it, it can stay red for a few days before it's noticed by someone.
I've always been a big fan of information radiators, build monitors, graphs and stats that are in peoples faces, and I just wanted to share our current solution to the whole 'who cares if the CI server is not Green' problem.
We use Go (the CI server from Thoughtworks) for our build and deployment pipeline, which is great. Although it doesn't ship with a build monitor that can be installed on a machine to show the state of the build, Thoughtworks do expose an API that allows you to build your own, for example on http://Server:Port/go/cctray.xml
We found an old-ish project called Cradiator that works with cruse control (remember that old build server? it turns out that Go has the same API, all be it on a slightly different URL). The problem was that we have secured our instance of Go so that you need to be logged in to access it. This caused problems with Cradiator and so we forked it and added the ability to set your own credentials in the config. The fork can be found here.
Below are a couple of screen shots showing the Go build server and also the corresponding Cradiator screen.
Our Go pipeline for this small part of the overall system
The Cradiator build monitor screen
As you can see every stage within a Go pipeline has a corresponding line in Cradiator. To achieve this, we use the following filter in the Cradiator config file:
project-regex="^.*::.*::.*"There is a robotic voice that announces who broke what, with some good catastrophic sound effects to accompany it. It's doing a great job of focusing people on fixing things if/when they go red.
Ever since we have started using this, the average time of a red build to a check in fixing it is less than an hour. Visibility for the win.
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