Introducing the New Workflow Dashboard: Off-the-shelf observability for GitHub Actions!
Tags: github, observability, cicd, monitoring
Published: 2023-01-25 08:27:15

*Consolidated workflow monitoring independent from repositories they belong to.*
> Streamline Observability for your CI Workflows: Introducing the New Workflow Dashboard

## Introduction
As developers, we understand the importance of streamlined and efficient CI workflows. They allow us to quickly and effectively identify and address any issues impacting our codebase and, ultimately, the performance of our applications. That's why we are thrilled to announce the release of a new feature of Foresight - [the Workflow Dashboard](https://www.runforesight.com/ci-cd-insights-and-analytics).

> Foresight provides developers with an off-the-shelf observability dashboard for GitHub Actions, making it easy to spot the elephant in your CI pipeline.

With our new feature, developers can easily troubleshoot CI workflow errors and focus on performance improvement efforts. The dashboard offers a variety of useful insights, including an aggregated view of your workflows with the number of executions, average duration, and the number of erroneous and successful runs. This allows you to quickly identify and address any issues with workflows that are not being fixed or are running slowly.

[![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/Vfwx0Ks8coyAYNPPGLDuGRazdl5Bj20kfJcwHoGiVD2esB_z76CHZMTCd9y677Txj2JgGPtA_UyHsvJ2TLb5DH1aLmN2kx74CbR995HvCH9iKw47aPFui9Xtw0UZncS5l8_AF1VmuK4jJl_VKe3pO50WdF9RNKV5I64WyNV3dHuLE2AXKqudBGFoZ-_rMQ)](https://youtu.be/LUvEBHFFFaM)

## What is the Workflow Dashboard
The Workflow Dashboard is designed to help users easily monitor and track the performance of their CI workflows over time. It combines the functionality of Foresight’s Repositories view and Highlights, allowing users to filter workflows by time, branch, and name. This means that users can quickly identify and address any issues with workflows that are not being fixed or are running slowly. You'll be able to see at a glance which workflows are causing problems and take immediate action to resolve them.

![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/Q5xMNtA1UrqwvFknPK5jK7cKkTrKl0E4jWz7TPrgJmmOgpWhxK_YHWJw-OwAOrcBhUrjiz7GmPc-6IwXfl16SPY5PqeLao-SIToYNDvz0wxxoWIrY4LFDB_RKcT8PYXGJQNKJXiZjmyn6zaINtqnmYpzA-_vYUzkPKV-nTTNsilYyvP8aTKrj8XTp5pF6w)

The Workflow Dashboard also includes a search feature, allowing users to focus on specific workflows across multiple repositories. This is especially useful for teams that are working on multiple codebases or projects at the same time. The search function allows you to quickly and easily find the specific workflows you're interested in without navigating multiple repositories. You can easily troubleshoot any issues that may be impacting the performance of your CI workflows, saving you time and increasing your productivity.

## Why Would you use it?
The benefits of Foresight’s GitHub Actions CI Monitoring feature are numerous. You can achieve faster and more reliable analytics for your CI pipelines, troubleshoot errors, detect anomalies, and achieve higher CI visibility and performance.

> By optimizing your build times and assessing GitHub Actions Performance analytics, you can save more than the cost of using our tool. And the best part is our feature is always free for open-source projects.

![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/8TYtpQcyFskgnvqALjSTolH7xQb6gCAYY1V8MgkYeONqZ53yulGrQ6zghZAs3AXUVc1zmxjc6UDlmAQgzm5m7Ymhjppavfe65QEC-k8e1y1j2R7Pn_Vn0zy3JearqrCclopFwyvPV63NYdopvsgKKZMVVaW1iCTE7fEkU_Z74zrqxCUTT6AijHg8X2EAIw)

Another key benefit of Foresight’s GitHub Actions CI Monitoring is the ability to track your workflow issues daily. You can figure out at what point the failure rate began to rise and take action to address the problem. This means you can quickly identify when an issue begins to occur and take action to fix it as soon as possible.  

![](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Pu1LFqVn5RgpHcEuB33PQwsztHg5I04CcsXth2G6seIcm7p-WzxqgtlJZE9kWcRytf_VQ7jZWO4yIa_ydrdd3zRpIAddh8vtTtzapzU8Pa7a7ULmi5pKe4Ajk9oLVx9uQY8eVSVHZnB2nhR97oK6DSVY6OpyEB4wweGUZ2hJCXqrAs4_ORTlX2E40ecf9A)

This feature also explains how pull requests (PR) affect your workflow run duration. With this information, you can identify the major impacts of a PR on your workflows and tests and take action to prevent production regressions early in the CI environments. This means you can catch errors before they make it to production, saving you time and resources in the long run.

Foresight also provides granular details, such as breakdowns of duration and failure rates for individual stages and jobs, allowing you to see which steps are blocking your CI pipeline. Additionally, our feature allows you to view your tests' duration, status, and flakiness in a workflow and compare it to previous runs to identify potential performance regressions. This means you can identify slow and flaky tests and take action to improve their performance.

![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/lZYjvjSGQqL9UbFvsS_heD4FmQeOCha3GYuc-qfO2IANvJOH-7hiOLx8dmDVZqLSjTpcwpcHN8cve9SENJHwyjh7EDhpHA4ttJ3AkoL-2EFLJT-L4Ik8pDoNCmuep8i0W3Fa2fwTLO3fPk7doBYZdSuzVUw71Hibz6wF-hQxwnb7rAfP8e8sW9FNVvrHfA)

The workflow dashboard also includes detailed trace charts and logs, making it easy to detect unusual behaviors on your GitHub Actions workflows and begin troubleshooting and optimizing. This means you can gain a deep understanding of how your CI pipeline is behaving and take action to improve it.

![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/IwfoG2_RWoBnz7_D9N536P6V_2yBcPB_2-bBvpERK7MYdJn9IZKWkvPpDEf-pdSYzZJm4lAGN0g9CC-m9GUEBFiM6LYIPlzcKWOGRo13vasehY-72MykimaxpRVWHDjFCfZSQdoTkCRo4GN6xv1pFQW4ncBmIxArVuaOPzFtvr-_yjOLlAyhSJ3BocjE5g)

## Workflow Dashboard for Software Teams
### Engineering Leaders
As an engineering manager or leader, it's important to have a clear understanding of the performance of your team's CI workflows. This is crucial to ensure that your team delivers high-quality software on time and within budget. With the new "workflow dashboard" feature of Foresight, you can easily monitor and track the performance of your team's workflows over time.

One of the key benefits of the workflow dashboard is the ability to search by workflow name. This makes it easy to focus on specific workflows across multiple repositories, which is especially useful for teams working on multiple codebases or projects simultaneously. This allows you to quickly and easily find the specific workflows you're interested in without navigating multiple repositories.

### Developers
You’d want to ensure that your code is integrated and deployed correctly and that any issues are identified and addressed quickly. With the new "workflow dashboard" feature of Foresight, you can easily monitor and track the performance of your workflows over time.

Additionally, the Workflow Dashboard provides granular details, such as breakdowns of duration and failure rates for individual stages and jobs, and view the duration, status, and flakiness of tests in a workflow. This can help developers identify slow and flaky tests and take action to improve their performance.

### DevOps Teams
As a DevOps team, it's important to understand the performance of your organization's CI workflows clearly. This is crucial to identify any issues promptly and ensure that the code is being integrated and deployed correctly. DevOps teams can monitor the performance and health of your organization’s workflows with Foresight’s workflow dashboard consolidated from a single pane of glass.

With the workflow dashboard, DevOps teams can better understand the overall health of their organization's codebase, identify any bottlenecks in the CI pipeline and focus on specific workflows for improvement. This helps teams to improve their efficiency and release better software to their customers.

### QA Teams
QA teams need to clearly understand the performance of the CI workflows that impact your testing efforts. With the new "workflow dashboard" feature of Foresight, your team can easily monitor and track the performance of specific workflows over time, including the number of executions, average duration, and the number of successful and erroneous runs. This allows you to quickly identify any issues with workflows that may be impacting your testing efforts and take action to address them.

In addition, the workflow dashboard allows QA teams to view granular details such as breakdowns of duration and failure rates for individual stages and jobs. This helps the QA team identify the blocking steps in the pipeline and thus helps to improve the pipeline.

## Conclusion
We understand the importance of streamlined and efficient CI workflows for our developer community, and we are committed to providing the best tools to help you achieve this. With the new Workflow Dashboard, we are taking a big step forward in helping you achieve more efficient and effective CI workflows.

Overall, our new GitHub Actions CI Monitoring feature is a powerful tool that helps developers improve the performance of their CI pipelines and deliver better software to their customers.

> You can easily troubleshoot issues, detect anomalies, and optimize your CI pipeline for better performance.

We encourage our users to check out the [Workflow Dashboard](https://docs.runforesight.com/features/workflow-dashboard) and let us know your thoughts. We always seek feedback and suggestions on improving our products to serve our community better.

You can install Foresight’s GitHub application from the [GitHub Marketplace](https://github.com/marketplace/thundra-foresight). The workflow dashboard feature comes off the shelf without needing any extra configurations. You can find the quick configuration guide of Foresight from this [documentation link](https://docs.runforesight.com/step-by-step-guide).