Kubernetes CI Policy: define metrics/reports that allow us to track whether the situation is getting better

[spiffxp]

Part of #18551

We were experiencing a lot of obvious pain as humans when kubernetes/kubernetes#92937 was opened.

There are a number of theories as to why that pain was being experienced, and we're now acting based on some of those theories.

What we are lacking is:

• metrics that show that pain is being experienced
• metrics that prove the theories as to why the pain was being experienced
• metrics/reports that prove the action we are taking is having positive/negative impact on overall CI health

This issue is intended to cover brainstorming, exploring and implementing metrics / reports that help guide us in the right direction.

Some suggestions / questions I'm pulling up from below

• can we / does it make sense to implement an alert when nothing has merged into kubernetes/kubernetes for a while, and should have (non-empty tide pool)?
• can we / does it make sense to implement an alert when the kubernetes/kubernetes non-release-branch tide pool is above a certain threshold? what should that threshold be?
• can we identify which job runs were due to new commits vs. /retest spam?

[spiffxp]

"We are experiencing pain" - kubernetes/kubernetes#92937

• PR's weren't merging into kubernetes/kubernetes' main branch for too long
  • can we have an alert for this?
  • need to account for periods when there's nothing to merge (e.g. weekends, holidays)
• one way we could measure/observe PR's not merging is by looking at tide pool size for kubernetes/kubernetes master
  • plotted at https://monitoring.prow.k8s.io/d/d69a91f76d8110d3e72885ee5ce8038e/tide-dashboard?orgId=1&fullscreen&panelId=5&from=now-90d&to=now
  • only moves at the speed of the slowest presubmit job
• PR's weren't merging due to jobs failing
  • these were occurring in tide's batch jobs
  • these were occurring on each PR in presubmit (e.g. trying to get "all green checkmarks" before tide would try merging)
  • do we have any flake / failure data over time for each of these?
  • can we say "this job is the one that's been causing batches to fail the most"?
  • etc.
• jobs were failing due to (flakes? scheduling errors? resource contention?)
  • jobs that failed due to test failure (flake or legitimate) end up in "failure" state
  • jobs that failed to schedule end up in "error" state

[spiffxp]

"Theories as to why the pain is being experienced"

• we suspect we may have encountered resource contention
  • can we see what the capacity of our build cluster is?
  • can we see it go over capacity?
• we suspect resource contention may have happened due to a higher-than-usual volume of traffic
  • were we dealing with more PR's than we have historically?
  • were we using more resources per-PR than we have historically?
  • are there more resources being consumed by non-k/k jobs than there have been historically?
• we suspect there was resource contention due to people spamming /retest
  • can we identify how many jobs a given PR triggered?
  • can we tell which job executions were due to a /retest vs. a push?

[BenTheElder]

I would really like to be able to track rates of https://prow.k8s.io/?state=error

currently we do have some metrics that basically track what you'd find on these pages, but it's the currently existing prowjob CRs, so it's influenced by the GC logic, instead of a guage.

[spiffxp]

Right, this plank dashboard is close to what @BenTheElder wants, but

• it's not based on "events" but the pool of ProwJob CR's created by plank that stick around for 48h before being cleaned up by sinker
• it's for all repos, not just kubernetes/kubernetes
• you need to manually click on the "error" series to single it out

I tried hacking up a version to filter just on "error" state

Compare this to the tide pool metric

They both grow at about the same time, but it takes a lot longer for the "error" jobs to fall off than it does tide pool size

[BenTheElder]

it's not based on "events" but the pool of ProwJob CR's created by plank that stick around for 48h before being cleaned up by sinker

nit: AIUI it's actually 48 hours OR the most recent result (periodic etc.)

[spiffxp]

What data sources are available to us?

• (google.com only) Cloud Monitoring of k8s-prow-builds
• (google.com only) Cloud Logging of k8s-prow
• Cloud Monitoring of k8s-infra-prow-build (available to k8s-infra-prow-viewers@kubernetes.io)
  • custom prow-build dashboard
  • custom prowjobs-experiment dashboard
  • infrastructure summary dashboard
• https://monitoring.prow.k8s.io (specifically whatever metrics the prometheus instance currently collects)
  • the prometheus instance has only recently had its retention raised from 30d to 1y, so we don't have much in the way of pre-"pain" data
• GCS (specifically all of the artifacts that end up in gs://kubernetes-jenkins)
  • not everything is going to land in here, for example jobs that fail to schedule and instead hit "error" state
  • walking GCS and scraping things can be pretty time intensive, we have kettle do that for us and populate...
• https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?project=k8s-gubernator (the k8s-gubernator:build.all bigquery dataset as populated by kettle)
  • there are things that end up in here that aren't run by prow.k8s.io
• GitHub's API
  • we could scrape PR's and try to reconstruct what happened based on events in PRs
• go.k8s.io/triage
  • this is based off of data that ends up in the k8s-gubernator:build.all dataset, but perhaps the right set of regexes to include/exclude certain jobs or tests could give us a feel for how things are failing/flaking now vs. two weeks ago
• devstats.cncf.io

[spiffxp]

How often are people spamming /retest or /test for kubernetes/kubernetes in the last 90d?
https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/5/bot-commands-repository-groups?orgId=1&var-period=d7&var-repogroup_name=Kubernetes&var-commands=%22%2Fretest%22&var-commands=%22%2Ftest%22&var-commands=%22%2Ftest%20all%22&from=now-90d&to=now

Thoughts:

• /test could be valid manual triggering, but could also be more representative of humans sitting on a PR being impatient
• this could just be a proxy for PR traffic, is there some way of tracking amount per PR, or normalizing for open PR's?

[BenTheElder]

There are also substantial flakes that are not related to infrastructure health. We need to avoid conflating all test flakes with infrastructure health.

…

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 5:46 PM Aaron Crickenberger < ***@***.***> wrote: How often are people spamming /retest or /test for kubernetes/kubernetes in the last 90d? https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/5/bot-commands-repository-groups?orgId=1&var-period=d7&var-repogroup_name=Kubernetes&var-commands=%22%2Fretest%22&var-commands=%22%2Ftest%22&var-commands=%22%2Ftest%20all%22&from=now-90d&to=now [image: Screen Shot 2020-08-12 at 5 42 47 PM] <https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/49258/90081921-5cb01b00-dcc3-11ea-9912-1592e716c627.png> Thoughts: - /test could be valid manual triggering, but could also be more representative of humans sitting on a PR being impatient - this could just be a proxy for PR traffic, is there some way of tracking amount per PR, or normalizing for open PR's? — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#18785 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAHADK22KY5QCNO44HXOSH3SAMZX7ANCNFSM4P3NIR3A> .

[spiffxp]

The screenshot I posted in #18785 (comment) was from a prototype of #19007, once that merges we'll be able to drill down and filter a little bit more in https://monitoring.prow.k8s.io/d/e1778910572e3552a935c2035ce80369/plank-dashboard?orgId=1

[fejta-bot]

Issues go stale after 90d of inactivity.
Mark the issue as fresh with /remove-lifecycle stale.
Stale issues rot after an additional 30d of inactivity and eventually close.

If this issue is safe to close now please do so with /close.

Send feedback to sig-testing, kubernetes/test-infra and/or fejta.
/lifecycle stale

[ameukam]

/remove-lifecycle stale

[spiffxp]

Anecdotally, we could really use some better visibility into common cases of jobs failing to schedule (or just failing)

• how often are pods evicted due to cluster maintenance / upgrades?
• how often are pods unable to schedule because the build cluster is at maximum capacity?
• (for super peaky situations: how long would we need to wait to smooth out peaky load?)

I suspect we are already occasionally hitting peaks of many PR's that cause the cluster to reach maximum capacity.

[spiffxp]

/sig testing
/wg k8s-infra
/priority important-longterm

[BenTheElder]

FWIW in the current state: https://prow.k8s.io/?state=error -- a quick sampling suggests these are largely due to nodepool exhaustion (transiently)

[spiffxp]

/milestone v1.23
I feel like the fun we recently had during v1.22 Code Freeze demonstrates that we're still not capable of visualizing all resources that could potentially be exhausted.

It seems like kubernetes/kubernetes#103512 was the biggest culprit, which came down to port exhaustion

[spiffxp]

/kind feature

[k8s-triage-robot]

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/lifecycle stale

[k8s-triage-robot]

The Kubernetes project currently lacks enough active contributors to adequately respond to all issues and PRs.

This bot triages issues and PRs according to the following rules:

• After 90d of inactivity, lifecycle/stale is applied
• After 30d of inactivity since lifecycle/stale was applied, lifecycle/rotten is applied
• After 30d of inactivity since lifecycle/rotten was applied, the issue is closed

You can:

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Please send feedback to sig-contributor-experience at kubernetes/community.

/lifecycle rotten

[k8s-triage-robot]

The Kubernetes project currently lacks enough active contributors to adequately respond to all issues and PRs.

This bot triages issues and PRs according to the following rules:

• After 90d of inactivity, lifecycle/stale is applied
• After 30d of inactivity since lifecycle/stale was applied, lifecycle/rotten is applied
• After 30d of inactivity since lifecycle/rotten was applied, the issue is closed

You can:

• Reopen this issue or PR with /reopen
• Mark this issue or PR as fresh with /remove-lifecycle rotten
• Offer to help out with Issue Triage

Please send feedback to sig-contributor-experience at kubernetes/community.

/close

[k8s-ci-robot]

@k8s-triage-robot: Closing this issue.

In response to this:

The Kubernetes project currently lacks enough active contributors to adequately respond to all issues and PRs.

This bot triages issues and PRs according to the following rules:

• After 90d of inactivity, lifecycle/stale is applied
• After 30d of inactivity since lifecycle/stale was applied, lifecycle/rotten is applied
• After 30d of inactivity since lifecycle/rotten was applied, the issue is closed

You can:

• Reopen this issue or PR with /reopen
• Mark this issue or PR as fresh with /remove-lifecycle rotten
• Offer to help out with Issue Triage

Please send feedback to sig-contributor-experience at kubernetes/community.

/close

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[ameukam]

/reopen
/lifecycle frozen

[k8s-ci-robot]

@ameukam: Reopened this issue.

In response to this:

/reopen
/lifecycle frozen

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