CI Workflow Monitoring for GitHub Actions with Foresight

Why GitHub + Foresight?

Foresight is made to power up observability for GitHub CI pipelines! It provides enhanced observability for CI workflows made with GitHub Actions.

It is a comprehensive solution that provides insights and analytics for both CI pipelines and tests furthermore automatically assessing the level of risk of software changes and suggesting optimization and prioritization tips for automated tests in CI pipelines.

Foresight is an observability steroid for GitHub Actions CI pipelines. While enjoying GitHub’s exceptional ability to build and operate CI pipelines, customers can ​​easily identify and prevent production regressions early in the software development lifecycle with Foresight. They can confidently speed up development velocity while staying in control. Foresight helps optimize build times and detect CI and test failures efficiently.

4 Pain Points Foresight Addresses

Lacking visibility of CI pipelines makes production error prone

Foresight’s actionable insights help to optimize your workflow performance and resolve problems rapidly. You can monitor resource usage metrics, understand workflow costs, duration, success & failure rates, jobs with the high failure rates, and more.

Tests slow down the process of releasing software to production

Long-running test suites and frequent failing tests are the most common reason for slowing down build times and hence reducing deployment frequency. Foresight provides visibility into test runs, enabling teams to quickly debug test failures, detect flaky tests, identify slow tests, and visualize performance over time to identify trends.

Change impact analysis (CIA) in testing is daunting

Foresight correlates the changes to the codebase with the test coverage reports to determine how much of the changes are covered by the tests, empowering teams with clear quality risk metrics to facilitate the right change management process. Pull requests can be automatically approved or passed through reviews depending on the quality risk to ensure only high-quality builds are moved to production.

Running tests without knowing which one to prioritize

Foresight tracks the code tested by each test and determines the tests that should be run to test the changes introduced to the codebase for each pull request. By prioritizing the subset of tests impacted by a pull request and the tests that are more likely to fail, Foresight can dramatically reduce the test cycle times without compromising quality.

How to setup Foresight’s GitHub Integration

With Foresight, you can monitor all GitHub Actions workflows and test frameworks such as JUnit, Jest, Python, TestNG, Trx, and xUnit 2. All you need to do is install Foresight's GitHub integration and update your YAML file.

You can follow the below steps to get started in less than a minute.

1. Create a Foresight account
2. Connect your GitHub Actions CI pipeline to Foresight
3. Install Foresight's GitHub integration
4. Choose the repositories you want to watch
5. Add Foresight’s test and workflow actions

You can find the quick configuration guide in this link.

Summary

Software teams create and execute CI pipelines with GitHub Actions. Foresight was purpose-built to address observability requirements of them, providing the end-to-end workflow visibility and analytics required to go fast to production safely.

Considering the importance of CI in the development cycle, gaining observability and visibility into the CI pipeline/process is becoming more critical to achieving success. Software teams need to solve issues in pre-production before they become a problem in production.

They require visibility in the continuous integration pipelines to know where the bottlenecks are or how to optimize them. And they need to know immediately. Without having visibility into it, when a CI workflow fails, software teams rely on guesswork and try to reproduce the error in their local machines to understand the errors’ root cause.

Knowing the success/failure rate, duration, and cost of their CI workflows at a granular state, software teams tend to develop more securely and comfortably.

Learn more and get support

To learn more about Foresight’s GitHub integration please refer to the Foresight documentation. Also, find the Foresight GitHub Action in GitHub Marketplace. We thrive to be active in Foresight’s blog and Youtube channel to communicate well with our audience. Please join Foresight’s Discord channel to be in continuous touch with our engineering, support, and marketing teams. For more information and any questions, please contact us at [e-mail]

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