Restart Jenkins job if a particular error is found - jenkins

Question

We are building a large number of variants of our code in every nightly build and naturally there will often be intermittent errors, even if the chance of a single error is only a fraction of a percent. Some of the most common ones are slaves that disconnect during a build and servers that don't respond.
The build failure analyzer plugin can categorize different failure causes but what we need is a plugin that can act on those problems and retrigger the build if there is an intermittent error. Preferebly the solution should fit into our build flow so that the results propagate to the job that creates the build report.
Is there such a plugin or other tool for doing this?

Answer 1

Here's Naginator Plugin!
you can :
Rerun build for unstable builds as well as failures
Only rebuild the job if the build's log output contains a given regular expression
Rerun build only for the failed parts of a matrix job

Answer 2

If you are using a Pipeline, you can define a generic retry method that takes an invocation and a retriable strategy as input.
What it does is to tee the execution in a separate file (using the tee step of Pipeline Utility Steps Plugin), then read the file and check if the retriable strategy applies.
Something like:
def retry(execution, isRetriable) {
def retryCount = 0
while (true) {
def file = "execution-${System.currentTimeMillis()}.log"
try {
tee(file) {
execution()
}
break
} catch (Exception e) {
def output = readFile(file: file)
if (isRetriable(output)) {
retryCount++
if (retryCount == 5) {
throw e
}
} else {
throw e
}
}
}
}
And then wrap your invocation with retry:
retry(
{ stepThatOccasionallyFails() },
{ output -> output.contains('a random error!') }
)