TFS Release gates do not fire - tfs

I am using TFS Release gates to call severall api's before i deploy.
Usually this works great. But sometimes the gates don't fire at all and the api is never called.
I set the timeout on 5 minutes.. so after 5 minutes it should try again.... But that sheduled is then messed up. sometimes it retries after 5 minutes (as it is supposed to) but sometimes it takes 11 or 12 minutes.....
It looks like the requests are queued somewhere... but i really gave no idea.
Anybody knows this behaviour ?

Updated
The Delay before evaluation is a time delay at the beginning of the gate evaluation process that allows the gates to initialize, stabilize, and begin providing accurate results for the current deployment
Gate actually is a sever task which is currently run on server. Some examples could prove
On-premise - Any on-premise/behind the firewall resources are
inaccessible
Env Variables - some of the environment variables are not accessible
(they are not yet initialized at the time of gate check)
It's run by release service account just as other tasks in release pipeline.
Besides, Delay before evaluation is meant to be the time samples from the gates might be unreliable. It's an acceptable phenomena. Sometimes it may need more time than your configuration to do the check.
Source Link: Release approvals and gates overview

Related

Beam Runner hooks for Throughput-based autoscaling

I'm curious if anyone can point me towards greater visibility into how various Beam Runners manage autoscaling. We seem to be experiencing hiccups during both the 'spin up' and 'spin down' phases, and we're left wondering what to do about it. Here's the background of our particular flow:
1- Binary files arrive on gs://, and object notification duly notifies a PubSub topic.
2- Each file requires about 1Min of parsing on a standard VM to emit about 30K records to downstream areas of the Beam DAG.
3- 'Downstream' components include things like inserts to BigQuery, storage in GS:, and various sundry other tasks.
4- The files in step 1 arrive intermittently, usually in batches of 200-300 every hour, making this - we think - an ideal use case for autoscaling.
What we're seeing, however, has us a little perplexed:
1- It looks like when 'workers=1', Beam bites off a little more than it can chew, eventually causing some out-of-RAM errors, presumably as the first worker tries to process a few of the PubSub messages which, again, take about 60 seconds/message to complete because the 'message' in this case is that a binary file needs to be deserialized in gs.
2- At some point, the runner (in this case, Dataflow with jobId 2017-11-12_20_59_12-8830128066306583836), gets the message additional workers are needed and real work can now get done. During this phase, errors decrease and throughput rises. Not only are there more deserializers for step1, but the step3/downstream tasks are evenly spread out.
3-Alas, the previous step gets cut short when Dataflow senses (I'm guessing) that enough of the PubSub messages are 'in flight' to begin cooling down a little. That seems to come a little too soon, and workers are getting pulled as they chew through the PubSub messages themselves - even before the messages are 'ACK'd'.
We're still thrilled with Beam, but I'm guessing the less-than-optimal spin-up/spin-down phases are resulting in 50% more VM usage than what is needed. What do the runners look for beside PubSub consumption? Do they look at RAM/CPU/etc??? Is there anything a developer can do, beside ACK a PubSub message to provide feedback to the runner that more/less resources are required?
Incidentally, in case anyone doubted Google's commitment to open-source, I spoke about this very topic with an employee there yesterday, and she expressed interest in hearing about my use case, especially if it ran on a non-Dataflow runner! We hadn't yet tried our Beam work on Spark (or elsewhere), but would obviously be interested in hearing if one runner has superior abilities to accept feedback from the workers for THROUGHPUT_BASED work.
Thanks in advance,
Peter
CTO,
ATS, Inc.
Generally streaming autoscaling in Dataflow works like this :
Upscale: If the pipeline's backlog is more than a few seconds based on current throughput, pipeline is upscaled. Here CPU utilization does not directly affect the amount of upsize. Using CPU (say it is at 90%), does not help in answering the question 'how many more workers are required'. CPU does affect indirectly since pipelines fall behind when they they don't enough CPU thus increasing backlog.
Downcale: When backlog is low (i.e. < 10 seconds), pipeline is downcaled based on current CPU consumer. Here, CPU does directly influence down size.
I hope the above basic description helps.
Due to inherent delays involved in starting up new GCE VMs, the pipeline pauses for a minute or two during resizing events. This is expected to improve in near future.
I will ask specific questions about the job you mentioned in description.

How to send warning email when build queue exceeds a particular length?

I manage a Jenkins server with a few hundred projects in the whole ecosystem. Many of the projects rely on upstream servers, that, unfortunately, are not always responsive. When I have a lag on these servers, my build queue can get to 10 or more. Is there a plugin or setting to send a warning email when the build queue exceeds a particular length?
I have been unable to find a plugin that does this, but you can query Jenkins for the information as detailed here: Jenkins command to get number of builds in queue.
If you have a Jenkins slave available you could set up a job that runs every 15 minutes and just hit each of the other Jenkins servers with the API call to get build queue counts (this is easy if you have just one master and many slaves.)
If you wanted to stay completely outside of Jenkins (not add another job to the mix) you could write a script to poll the Jenkins API for the information. You could then run that script under, say, a 15 minute (or some other relevant time step) timer using cron (or windows scheduled task). Admittedly then you have to dedicate some resources to running this job.
It looks like you could use python to get the build queue and check the length of the returned list. get_queue_info()
I haven't mucked about with the Jenkins API much myself so I'm not sure offhand exactly what the script would need, but it should be simple enough once you dig into it.

travis/coverity: automatically re-schedule a build after given time

I'm using githubs integration of travis-ci with coverity-scan (the free versions of all these services) to test my FLOSS code.
The problem I'm facing is that when continuously working on the code, i'm hitting the coverity quota pretty soon.
Since I'm working on multiple projects simultaneously, it can therefore well be that I switch away from working on a given project before I'm allowed to submit a coverity again, thus potentially having flaws in the code for weeks although they would have been caught easily by coverity.
I would like to avoid this.
The first measure to prevent hitting the quota too frequently, is by using a dedicated branch (usually coverity_scan) which does not receive pushes as often as the master and/or feature branches.
However, this puts cognitive load on the user (me), which I also like to avoid.
Also, sometimes I still hit the quota (some of my projects as in the 100k-500k lines-of-code range, so they have a lower threshold than usual).
What I would like to have is being able to automatically re-trigger a coverity-scan once the quota has expired, if (and only if) the current build did hit the quota.
Is somthing like this possible with plain travis-ci/coverity features?
Or would I have to setup a separate hook, that monitors the coverity quota and travis-ci builds?
You don't need to run Coverity on every check-in. It's just too slow.
You should configure your (coverity build) system to poll your repo for changes, but have them checked infrequently. Something like a few times per day.
This will trigger the build when things change, but not on every change that is detected.

Stop Jenkins schedule build if it was failed more than 10 times?

I set my Jenkins job to build automaticlally many times a day by the scheduler.
If the build is failed, it will send mail to my team.
However I don't want to spamming the mail box. How can I set a condition to stop the build scheduler if it was failed more than 10 times ?
Rather than scheduling the job continuously, try the continuous integration paradigm, like this:
Unconditionally schedule the job only rarely. Perhaps once per day, just to ensure than any external factors (missing resources, changed interfaces, etc.) haven't come into play.
Trigger the job when any known source or dependency changes (e.g. source code, jar in your artifact repository, DB schema change, etc.)
Use a suitable plugin to retry failures.
I recommend the Naginator plugin for this. It can nag a limited number of times, and it auto-throttles: it nags frequently to begin with, then less frequently after a protacted period of failure.
Even if you don't change how the job is trigger, Naginator is probably a good solution for you. Use it to send your emails, instead of using an unconditional on-failure step.

Quartz.Net jobs not always running - can't find any reason why

We're using Quartz.Net to schedule about two hundred repeating jobs. Each job uses the same IJob implementing class, but they can have different schedules. In practice, they end up having the same schedule, so we have about two hundred job details, each with their own (identical) repeating/simple trigger, scheduled. The interval is one hour.
The task this job performs is to download an rss feed, and then download all of the media files linked to in the rss feed. Prior to downloading, it wipes the directory where it is going to place the files. A single run of a job takes anywhere from a couple seconds to a dozen seconds (occasionally more).
Our method of scheduling is to call GetScheduler() on a new StdSchedulerFactory (all jobs are scheduled at once into the same IScheduler instance). We follow the scheduling with an immediate Start().
The jobs appear to run fine, but upon closer inspection we are seeing that a minority of the jobs occasionally - or almost never - run.
So, for example, all two hundred jobs should have run at 6:40 pm this evening. Most of them did. But a handful did not. I determine this by looking at the file timestamps, which should certainly be updated if the job runs (because it deletes and redownloads the file).
I've enabled Quartz.Net logging, and added quite a few logging statements to our code as well.
I get log messages that indicate Quartz is creating and executing jobs for roughly one minute after the round of jobs starts.
After that, all activity stops. No jobs run, no log messages are created. Zero.
And then, at the next firing interval, Quartz starts up again and my log files update, and various files start downloading. But - it certainly appears like some JobDetail instances never make it to the head of the line (so to speak) or do so very infrequently. Over the entire weekend, some jobs appeared to update quite frequently, and recently, and others had not updated a single time since starting the process on Friday (it runs in a Windows Service shell, btw).
So ... I'm hoping someone can help me understand this behavior of Quartz.
I need to be certain that every job runs. If it's trigger is missed, I need Quartz to run it as soon as possible. From reading the documentation, I thought this would be the default behavior - for SimpleTrigger with an indefinite repeat count it would reschedule the job for immediate execution if the trigger window was missed. This doesn't seem to be the case. Is there any way I can determine why Quartz is not firing these jobs? I am logging at the trace level and they just simply aren't there. It creates and executes an awful lot of jobs, but if I notice one missing - all I can find is that it ran it the last time (for example, sometimes it hasn't run for hours or days). Nothing about why it was skipped (I expected Quartz to log something if it skips a job for any reason), etc.
Any help would really, really be appreciated - I've spent my entire day trying to figure this out.
After reading your post, it sounds a lot like the handful of jobs that are not executing are very likely misfiring. The reason that I believe this:
I get log messages that indicate Quartz is creating and executing jobs for roughly one minute after the round of jobs starts.
In Quartz.NET the default misfire threshold is 1 minute. Chances are, you need to examine your logging configuration to determine why those misfire events are not being logged. I bet if you throw open the the floodgates on your logging (ie. set everything to debug, and make sure that you definitely have a logging directive for the Quartz scheduler class), and then rerun your jobs. I'm almost positive that the problem is the misfire events are not showing up in your logs because the logging configuration is lacking something. This is understandable, because logging configuration can get very confusing, very quickly.
Also, in the future, you might want to consult the quartz.net forum on google, since that is where some of the more thorny issues are discussed.
http://groups.google.com/group/quartznet?pli=1
Now, your other question about setting the policy for what the scheduler should do, I can't specifically help you there, but if you read the API docs closely, and also consult the google discussion group, you should be able to easily set the misfire policy flag that suits your needs. I believe that Trigger's have a MisfireInstruction property which you can configure.
Also, I would argue that misfires introduce a lot of "noise" and should be avoided; perhaps bumping up the thread count on your scheduler would be a way to avoid misfires? The other option would be to stagger your job execution into separate/multiple batches.
Good luck!

Resources