CircleCI and Sumo Logic have released an integration to allow developers to view analytical data about CircleCI jobs from within a Sumo Logic dashboard. This integration is packaged using the CircleCI package management solution, Orbs. The integration includes real-time pipeline data, such as number of failed builds, average run time, and job status.
This integration with Sumo Logic allows for processing and visualizing of core pipeline analytics. Data that can be viewed includes job outcomes, jobs by project, slowest failed jobs, and slowest successful jobs. In addition custom logs can also be emitted from the container.
Orbs were released late last year along with CircleCI’s technology partner program. Orbs are shareable packages the combine commands, executors, and jobs into a reusable block. Nathan Dintenfass, product manager with CircleCI, shared that orbs are meant to solve three key problems: simplifying CircleCI configuration, allowing for code reuse, and reduction of boilerplate required for setting up CI/CD pipelines.
Within the orbs registry, CircleCI has listings of official orbs, partner-provided orbs, and community submitted orbs. The Sumo Logic orb is one of over 900 orbs in the registry.
To get started with the Sumo Logic orb, the orb must be added to the CircleCI project by including the orb name into the .circleci/config.yml file (where x.y.z represents the current orb version):
orbs:
sumologic: circleci/sumologic@x.y.z
With that in place the workflow-collector job needs to be enabled:
version: 2.1
workflows:
build-test-and-deploy:
jobs:
- sumologic/workflow-collector # add this job to track workflow.
- build
- test:
requires:
- build
- deploy:
requires:
- test
From within the Sumo Logic account, two source collectors will need to be created. These will return an HTTPS URL that the job data will be sent to. One source collector should be called circleci/job-collector and the other circleci/workflow-collector.
In a conversation with InfoQ, Michael Stahnke, vice-president of platform for CircleCI, shared that this is the beginning of the new data features for CircleCI. While the first additions are geared more towards real-time metrics, such as job status, the team will be looking to add deeper visibility into the pipeline health. Stahnke indicated these new metrics are meant to help answer the question: how healthy is my pipeline?
Stahnke continued to share that their goal with this data approach is to start allowing CircleCI users to tap into the data sets that CircleCI has available. Stahnke indicates that the overall goal is to provide insight into your job progress and help you optimize your software development practices. He indicated that future releases will continue to build on the data analytics collected with this initial integration.
The Sumo Logic orb for CircleCI is available now within the orbs registry. More details can be found on the CircleCI website.
