There are hundreds of capabilities on CircleCI that were designed to create the best possible CI/CD experience for our users. But one feature that users often point to as the most valuable on the platform is the CircleCI Insights dashboard.
The Insights dashboard provides full visibility into metrics like job status, duration monitoring, and solutions for pipeline optimization. As a developer, it gives you full control over your build process, providing fast feedback and more efficient use of resources.
Insights dashboard core functions
Take a closer look at the core functionality of the dashboard below.
Pipeline optimization
Insights helps identify key optimization targets during your build, test, and deployment process. Within the dashboard, you can view project health at a glance by identifying trends, seeing what’s working, and which tests may be failing.
Testing
The dashboard also gives you a bird’s eye view of test insights with a close eye on end-to-end flaky test detection. In just a few clicks, you can determine if your test has failed and quickly work to find a resolution.
Workflows
Using simple YAML configuration, you can access insights for your workflows, allowing you to orchestrate concurrent job runs and execute them efficiently. This can also shorten your feedback loop, helping you to make better engineering decisions overall. Learn more about CircleCI workflows here.
There’s a lot you can do with Insights to ensure you’re getting the most out of CircleCI. Read on to learn about some of the most impactful capabilities.
1. Ensure your pipeline data accuracy
Using a specialized algorithm built directly into CircleCI, you can ensure that your pipeline consistently delivers accurate data. With the Insights outlier detection tooling, your team can quickly and easily hide outliers to even out the impact of outsized values, giving you a more accurate view of your data.
2. Use resource class insights to save on usage costs
Monitoring your CPU/RAM usage helps you and your team better understand your resource consumption to make the most educated decisions around your usage costs and pipeline optimizations. Reports like the graph below allow you to determine exactly what your usage looks like. If usage is high, you may consider upgrading your resource class, and if it’s low, you could save money by moving to a lower resource class.
3. Up your efficiency with flaky test scanning and detection
Flaky test scanning is an ongoing function of the Insights dashboard. The dashboard shows a high-level overview of test performance, but also allows your team access to a more granular level of analysis. With flaky test scanning and detection, you get an up-close and personalized view of which tests are failing within your active or completed builds. When a flaky test is detected, the Insights dashboard immediately labels the test flaky, making it easier to filter out the components of your build that may need further attention.
4. Save significant amounts of development time
Parallelism is one of the most beneficial Insights features when it comes to saving development time. This functionality allows tests to run simultaneously using a single compute resource. While test splitting in CircleCI can support many different frameworks, parallelism saves significant time by conducting test splitting right there in your test suite — even across multiple execution environments.
5. Dig deeper into your job data
Your job data contains a lot of valuable information. Download job data from the Insights dashboard to more fully examine and understand your data, use it for self-correction, or share it with your team to further optimize your pipelines.
6. Identify which projects need test optimization
The CircleCI API gives your team the opportunity to identify which projects could benefit from test optimizations. In the Insights main dashboard, build custom dashboards for you and your team to use via the API. Within these dashboards, add specific insights like summary metrics and trends for a single project or for your entire org.
A common challenge in software delivery is the lack of complete insights into the pipeline, build process, and projects. CircleCI Insights is the first step in helping you and your team gain complete control over your development process. And the best part is that you can customize it to provide exactly what you need when you need it.
Check out your own CircleCI Insights.
