Added guide for monitoring CI

This should help provide context on how CI works and what processes to
follow to maintain our tests.

Signed-off-by: alejandrox1 <alarcj137@gmail.com>

contributors/devel/sig-testing/monitoring.md

@@ -0,0 +1,212 @@
+# Monitoring Kubernetes Health
+
+**Table of Contents**
+
+- [Monitoring Kubernetes Health](#monitoring-kubernetes-health)
+  - [Monitoring the health of Kubernetes with TestGrid](#monitoring-the-health-of-kubernetes-with-testgrid)
+    - [What dashboards should I monitor?](#what-dashboards-should-i-monitor)
+  - [What do I do when I see a TestGrid alert?](#what-do-i-do-when-i-see-a-testgrid-alert)
+    - [Communicate your findings](#communicate-your-findings)
+    - [Fill out the issue](#fill-out-the-issue)
+    - [Iterate](#iterate)
+
+
+## Monitoring the health of Kubernetes with TestGrid
+
+TestGrid is a highly-configurable, interactive dashboard for viewing your test
+results in a grid, see https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/testgrid.
+
+The Kubernetes community has its own instance of TestGrid, https://testgrid.k8s.io/,
+which we use to monitor and observe the health of the project.
+
+Each SIG has its own set of dashboards, and each dashboard is composed of
+different end-to-end (e2e) jobs.
+E2E jobs are in turn made up of test stages (i.e., bootstraping a Kubernetes
+cluster, tearing down a Kubernetes cluster) and e2e tests (e.g., Kubectl client
+Kubectl logs should be able to retrieve and filter logs).
+These views allow different teams to monitor and understand how their areas
+are doing.
+
+We highly encourage anyone to periodically monitor these dashboards.
+If you see that a job or test has been failing please raise an issue with the
+corresponding SIG in either their mailing list of in slack.
+
+Help maintaining tests, fixing broken tests, improving test success rates, and
+overall test improvements are always highly needed throughout the project.
+
+**Note**: It is important that all SIGs periodically monitor their jobs and
+tests. These are used to figure out when to release Kubernetes.
+Furthermore, if jobs or tests are failing or flaking, then pull requests will
+take a lot longer to be merged.
+
+
+### What dashboards should I monitor?
+
+This depends on what areas of Kubernetes you want to contribute to.
+You should monitor the dashboards owned by the SIG you are working with.
+Additionally, you should check
+
+* https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-master-blocking and
+* https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-master-informing
+
+Since these jobs run tests owned by other SIGs.
+Also make sure to periodically check on the "blocking" and "informing"
+dashboards for past releases.
+
+---
+
+## What do I do when I see a TestGrid alert?
+
+If you are part of a SIG's mailing list, occasionally you may see email from
+TestGrid reporting that a job or a test has recently failed.
+If you are casually browsing through TestGrid, you may also see jobs labeled as
+"flaky" (in purple) or as "failing" (in red).
+This section is to help guide you on what to do in these occasions.
+
+### Communicate your findings
+
+The number one thing to do is to communicate your finding (a test or job has
+been flaking or failing).
+If you saw a TestGrid alert on a mailing list, please reply to the thread and
+mentioned that you are looking into it.
+It is important to communicate to prevent duplicate work and to ensure CI
+problems get attention.
+
+In order to communicate with the rest of the community and to drive the work,
+please open up an issue on Kubernetes,
+https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/new/choose , chose the appropriate issue
+template.
+
+### Fill out the issue
+
+1. **Which job(s) are failing or flaking**
+
+The job is the tab in TestGrid that you are looking at.
+
+<img src="./testgrid-images/testgrid-jobs.png" height="50%" width="40%">
+
+The above example was taken from the SIG Release dashboard and we can see that
+* `conformance-ga-only` https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-master-blocking#conformance-ga-only,
+* `skew-cluster-latest-kubectl-stable1-gce` https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-master-blocking#skew-cluster-latest-kubectl-stable1-gce,
+* `gci-gce-ingress` https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-master-blocking#gci-gce-ingress,
+* `kind-master-parallel` https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-master-blocking#kind-master-parallel
+
+are flaky (we should have some issues opened up for these to investigate why
+:smile:).
+
+2. **Which tests are failing or flaking**
+
+Let's grab an example from the SIG release dashboards and look at the
+`node-kubelet-features-master` job in
+https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-master-informing#node-kubelet-features-master.
+
+<img src="./testgrid-images/failed-tests.png" height="70%" width="100%">
+
+Here we see that at 16.07 EDT and 15:07 EDT the job
+```
+[k8s.io] NodeProblemDetector [NodeFeature:NodeProblemDetector] [k8s.io] SystemLogMonitor should generate node condition and events for corresponding errors [ubuntu]
+```
+Failed for Kubernetes commit `9af86e8db` (this value is a row below the time -
+the value above it is the run ID).
+The corresponding test-infra commit was `11cb57d36` (the value below the commit
+for Kubernetes).
+
+At 15:07 EDT, the job
+```
+[k8s.io] NodeProblemDetector [NodeFeature:NodeProblemDetector] [k8s.io] SystemLogMonitor should generate node condition and events for corresponding errors [cos-stable2]
+```
+
+failed as well.
+
+If one or both of these jobs continue failing, or if they failed frently
+enough, we should open an issue an investigate.
+
+3. **Since when has it been failing or flaking**
+
+This information you can get from the header of the page showing you all the
+tests.
+Going from top to bottom, you will see
+* date
+* time
+* job run ID
+* Kubernetes commit that was tested
+* (Most often) test-infra commit
+
+4. **Reason for failure**
+
+The aim for this issues is to begin investigating - you don't have to find the
+reason for failure right away (nor the solution).
+However, do post any information you find usesful.
+
+One way of getting useful information is to click on the failed runs (the red
+rectablges).
+This will send you to a page called **spyglass**.
+
+If we do this for the above test failures in `node-kubelet-features-master`, we
+will see the following
+
+<img src="./testgrid-images/spyglass-summary.png" height="60%" width="100%">
+
+Right away it will show you what tests failed.
+Here we see that 2 test failed (both related to the node problem detector) and
+the `e2e.go: Node Tests` stage was marked as failed (because the node problem
+detector tests failed).
+
+You will often see "stages" (steps in an e2e job) as mixed with the tests
+themselves.
+The statges imform you of what is going on in the e2e job when an error
+occurred.
+
+If we click on the first test error we will see logs that will (hopefully) help
+us figure out why the test failed.
+
+<img src="./testgrid-images/spyglass-result.png" height="60%" width="100%">
+
+Further down the page you will see all the logs for the entire test run.
+Please copy any information you think may be useful from here into the issue.
+
+5. **Anything else we need to know**
+
+There is this wonderful page built by SIG testing that often comes in handy:
+https://storage.googleapis.com/k8s-gubernator/triage/index.html?pr=1
+This page is called **Triage**.
+We can use it to see if test we see failing in a given job has been failing in
+others and, in general, to understand how jobs are behaving.
+
+For example, we can see how the job we have been looking at has been behaving
+recently.
+
+There is one important detail we have to mention at this point, the job names
+you see on TestGrid are often aliases.
+For example, when we clicked on a test run for
+`node-kubelet-features-master`
+(
+https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-master-informing#node-kubelet-features-master
+), at the top left corner of spyglass the page tells us the real job name,
+`ci-kubernetes-node-kubelet-features` (notice the "ci-kubernetes-" prefix).
+Then we can use this full job name in Triage
+
+https://storage.googleapis.com/k8s-gubernator/triage/index.html?pr=1&job=ci-kubernetes-node-kubelet-features
+
+At the time of this writing we saw the following
+
+<img src="./testgrid-images/triage.png" height="50%" width="100%">
+
+**Note**: notice that you can also improve your query by filtering or excluding
+results based on test name or failure text.
+
+Sometime Triage will help you find patterns to figure out whats wrong.
+In this instance we can also see that this job has been failing rather
+frequently (about 2 times per hour).
+
+### Iterate
+
+Once you have filled out the issue, please mention it in the appropriate mailing
+list thread (if you see an email from testgrid mentioning a job or test
+failure) and share it with the appropriate SIG in the Kubernetes slack.
+
+Don't worry if you are not sure how to debug further or how to resole the
+issue!
+All issues are unique and require a bit of experience to figure out how to work
+on them.
+For the time being, reach out to people in slack or the mailing list.