In this lab you will use the forecast
command to forecast potential GitHub Actions usage by computing metrics from completed pipeline runs in Bitbucket.
- Followed the steps here to set up your GitHub Codespaces environment.
- Completed the configure lab.
Answer the following questions before running the forecast
command:
- What workspace do you want to run the forecast for?
- actions-importer
- What is the date you want to start forecasting from?
- 2023-08-03. By default, the value is set to one week ago, but it's recommended that you choose a start date that provides a representative view of typical usage.
- Where do you want to store the results?
- tmp/forecast
-
Navigate to your codespace terminal
-
Run the following command from the root directory:
gh actions-importer forecast bitbucket --workspace actions-importer --start-date 2023-08-03 --output-dir tmp/forecast --source-file-path bitbucket/**/source_files/*.json
Note: The
--source-file-path
option is not required and is used throughout this lab to convert files that are stored locally. This can be omitted and GitHub Actions Importer will programmatically fetch historical pipeline runs using the Bitbucket REST APIs. -
The command will list all the files written to disk when the command succeeds.
[2023-09-07 18:26:22] Logs: 'tmp/audit/log/valet-20230907-182622.log' [2023-09-07 18:26:22] Forecasting 'https://bitbucket.org/actions-importer' [2023-09-07 18:26:22] Output file(s): [2023-09-07 18:26:22] tmp/forecast/forecast_report.md
The forecast report, logs, and completed job data will be located within the tmp/forecast
folder.
- Find the
forecast_report.md
file in the file explorer. - Right-click the
forecast_report.md
file and selectOpen Preview
. - This file contains metrics used to forecast potential GitHub Actions usage.
The "Total" section of the forecast report contains high level statistics related to all the jobs completed after the --start-date
CLI option:
- Job count: **8**
- Pipeline count: **8**
- Execution time
- Total: **11 minutes**
- Median: **1 minutes**
- P90: **4 minutes**
- Min: **1 minutes**
- Max: **4 minutes**
- Concurrent jobs
- Median: **0**
- P90: **0**
- Min: **0**
- Max: **1**
Here are some key terms of items defined in the forecast report:
- The
job count
is the total number of completed jobs. - The
pipeline count
is the number of unique pipelines used. Execution time
describes the amount of time a runner spent on a job. This metric can be used to help plan for the cost of GitHub-hosted runners.- This metric is correlated to how much you should expect to spend in GitHub Actions. This will vary depending on the hardware used for these minutes. You can use the Actions pricing calculator to estimate a dollar amount.
Concurrent jobs
metrics describe the amount of jobs running at any given time. This metric can be used to define the number of runners a customer should configure.
Additionally, these metrics are defined by hosted and self-hosted runners.
You can examine the available options for the forecast
command by running gh actions-importer forecast --help
. When you do this you will see the --source-file-path
option:
$ gh actions-importer forecast -h
Options:
--source-file-path <source-file-path> (REQUIRED) The file path(s) to existing jobs data.
-o, --output-dir <output-dir> (REQUIRED) The location for any output files.
--start-date <start-date> The start date of the forecast analysis in YYYY-MM-DD format. [default: 9/12/2022 12:42:39 PM]
--time-slice <time-slice> The time slice in seconds to use for computing concurrency metrics. [default: 60]
--credentials-file <credentials-file> The file containing the credentials to use.
--no-telemetry Boolean value to disallow telemetry.
--no-ssl-verify Disable ssl certificate verification.
--no-http-cache Disable caching of http responses.
-?, -h, --help Show help and usage information
You can use the --source-file-path
CLI option to combine data from multiple reports into a single report. This becomes useful if you use multiple CI/CD providers and want to get a holistic view of the runner usage. This works by using the .json
files generated by forecast
commands as space-delimited values for the --source-file-path
CLI option. Optionally, this value could be a glob pattern to dynamically specify the list of files (e.g. **/*.json
).
Below is a example command that would generate a report for all files matching tmp/**/jobs/*.json
:
gh actions-importer forecast --source-file-path tmp/**/jobs/*.json --output-dir tmp/forecast-combined