Datadog-CI Visibility Guide: Enhancing Continuous Integration in 2023

Continuous Integration (CI) is no longer a luxury in the software development ecosystem. It's a necessity. As developers, we're well aware that CI streamlines the development process by automating the integration of code changes, ensuring that these changes are consistent and error-free.

Datadog, a recognized name in the realm of monitoring and observability, has expanded its offering into the CI space. In a world where microservices and intricate dependencies dominate, tools that provide actionable insights into the CI process are more crucial than ever.

The Need for Enhanced Continuous Integration in 2023

The software landscape of 2023 is a labyrinth of microservices, cloud-native applications, and intricate dependencies. This complexity underscores the need for CI tools that offer real-time monitoring.

By fusing real-time monitoring with tools like Datadog-CI Visibility or AI-driven ones like Mergify CI Monitoring, developers receive instantaneous feedback, allowing them to address issues immediately, saving time and resources.

What is Datadog-CI Visibility?

Datadog, primarily known for its cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform, has ventured into the realm of Continuous Integration with Datadog-CI Visibility. But what makes it stand out?

Scope

Unlike traditional monitoring tools that merely provide a window into runtime behaviors, Datadog-CI Visibility focuses on the entire CI/CD pipeline, monitoring the build, test, and deploy stages with equal rigor.

Integration

Datadog-CI Visibility is built with an integration-first approach. It's designed to complement existing CI tools rather than replace them.

Whether you're using Jenkins, Travis CI, or any other popular CI solution, Datadog-CI Visibility melds seamlessly.

Feedback Loop

In CI, feedback is gold. The quicker developers receive feedback, the faster they can act.

Datadog-CI Visibility shortens this feedback loop, providing developers with real-time metrics, logs, and traces for every code integration attempt.

Integrating Datadog-CI Visibility with Popular CI Tools

The magic of Datadog-CI Visibility is fully realized when integrated with your favorite CI tools.

Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc.

These tools, popular among modern development teams, require a slightly different approach. API-based integrations are the key. By linking these tools with Datadog-CI Visibility via API, teams can harness powerful analytics on their CI data.

This includes insights into bottlenecks in the pipeline, inefficient workflows, and even resource consumption metrics. Detailed dashboards visualize this data, providing a bird's eye view of the entire CI process.

Click on the page below, and you will access docs teaching you how to set up Datadog-CI Visibility with any CI.

Datadog-CI Visibility Features that Empower CI

Datadog-CI Visibility isn't just a monitoring tool. It's a powerhouse designed for CI. Below, we listed all of the things Datadog-CI Visibility allows you to do.

Monitor CI Pipelines:

• Gain a deep understanding of all your CI pipelines.
• Use the Pipelines dashboard for a holistic view of pipeline, stage, and job performances.
• Identify performance trends and areas needing attention.

Integration & Instrumentation:

• Supports major CI solutions like GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, and Buildkite.
• Automatic instrumentation of pipelines upon integration.

Test Monitoring & Analysis:

• Monitor test patterns and pain point issues.
• Get a holistic view of test suites, tracking passes, fails, and skips.
• Detect new flaky tests that inconsistently pass or fail for identical commits.

Troubleshoot Flaky Tests:

• Identify branches with new flaky tests and review commit overviews.
• Access summaries highlighting all flaky tests in a service’s suite.
• View test runs linked to the initial flaky commit.

Test Performance Analysis:

• Just as with pipelines, tests are automatically instrumented.
• Examine test traces in detail to identify failure points.
• Review error details, stacktraces, and link back to the CI provider for more context.

Mergify CI Monitoring: The Next Evolution in CI

Announcing Mergify CI Monitoring — a product set to redefine CI processes. Designed with AI at its core, it is adaptable to any framework, ensuring a wide range of applications.

While solutions like Datadog-CI Visibility give you access to data and insights, you still need to interpret them and do manual actions. We decided to change that with CI Monitoring, a new product that, additionally to giving you number analysis, will act to save you time and money.

Let's go deeper into some CI Monitoring features:

CI Dashboard View

The CI Dashboard feature lets you view the status of your CI as a whole. Thanks to a range of filters, you can focus on the CI jobs that interest you at any given moment.

• Visualize all your CI jobs on a single Dashboard.
• Navigate through the custom date range and state.
• Check your CI's overall condition at a glance.

Logs Analysis

Leveraging the power of AI, CI Monitoring delves deep into logs, providing developers with real-time feedback and actionable insights. Once analysis is over, it's time for CI Monitoring to classify your tests.

Classify and Understand CI Failures

CI failures are annoying, especially when you don't know where they come from or why they happened. The Failure Diagnosis feature allows you to identify the root causes of failure.

• Identify and record all failures.
• Understand root causes: infra, network or tests.
• Find out how to avoid these failures faster.

Automatic Retries

When diagnosing failures, our AI is able to detect the flaky tests present in your suite. While waiting to repair them definitively, the Flaky Retrier feature lets you choose which tests CI Monitoring should automatically re-run.

• Our AI detects and spots flaky tests.
• Highlighting the pass/fail rate for each test.
• Decide which tests to automatically retry.
• Flakyguard feature

Universal Integration

CI Monitoring is agnostic. In other words, it works and interfaces perfectly with all CI tools and test frameworks.‍ You won't need to configure it for every framework in your test suite.

• Enable CI Monitoring.
• Set it up once and for all.
• Let AI do the work.

More than just an error tracker, join the waiting list to be among the first to use CI Monitoring.

Conclusion

Continuous Integration (CI) has ushered in a transformative phase in 2023, and at the heart of this transformation lie powerful tools such as Datadog-CI Visibility and Mergify CI Monitoring. For developers striving to understand the rapidly evolving world of modern software development, these platforms serve as invaluable compasses.

Through this article, we've provided a snapshot of how Datadog-CI Visibility can revolutionize your development team. Yet, to truly grasp its depth, diving into their official documentation might be a good next step.

As we navigate the changing tides of CI, it's becoming increasingly clear that the synergy between real-time monitoring and artificial intelligence is setting the benchmark.

It's this very intersection that we, at Mergify, are working on—melding the best of both worlds to grant developers deeper insights and unparalleled efficiency.