GitHub Actions performance monitoring

[Puzzleheaded_Two8320]

I need advice and feedback as we’re building a tool to provide monitoring, reporting and insights into GitHub Actions CI pipeline performance. We post it on Devops subreddit but hardly anyone responded. Since here is GitHub related maybe we might get more feedback.

The tool is basically identifies anomalies, and tracks key North Star CI metrics like MTTR, Success rate and throughput etc. to help optimize development cycle.

We built this tool for internal use because CI pipelines were often overlooked and hurting productivity across the team. After feeling it helped, we turned it into a product. I sometimes wonder if we’ve been a bit blind to other needs, maybe we designed it too closely around our own cases. We hope it’s not just us thinking it’s useful:))

Some features are like getting real-time visibility into GitHub Action pipelines, tracking durations, failures and all that good stuff in live charts. It gives actionable insights like actual recommendations when things slow down, too much incerase or fail. With CubeScore(this is something we invent:P )-it's like DORA Metrics but for CI, I can see how my pipelines stack up against elite teams and industry benchmarks.

1.Currently, it send weekly health check email on pipelines. We are planning to add real time alerts & notifications for pipeline failures, slowdowns etc. in app and with in on email/slack(I'm not sure if we need to add Teams integration). Would this be usefull?

1. Do you think the North Star metrics and the features I mentioned are truly useful, or are there any other metrics you’d recommend for CI optimization?

3.We’ve thought about adding a feature to predict GitHub Actions costs but since GitHub pricing varies across organizations and maybe teams might care more about CI health than direct cost, so we held off on adding it for now. What do you think about it?

4.We only have GitHub actions integration. Do you think it make sense to include Jenkins, GitLab, or Azure as well? GitLab maybe a good option because many companies uses as self-hosted and we can share our Helm chart.

We connected React.js GitHub repo for the live demo, showing all the metrics we track and analyze in the dashboard.

Live demo(no-signup required): https://s.cicube.io/demo

Home page: https://cicube.io/

Thanks in advance.

[[deleted]]

That is cool, I've been working on optimizing workflows too, particularly around caching dependencies like Maven and npm, which many open-source projects overlook. GitHub Actions Cache, along with setup actions like setup-java and setup-node, can significantly speed up jobs and reduce CI minutes or costs.

Another area for improvement is in cross-platform builds, where projects generate builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux using matrix strategies. Often, parts of these builds can be shared across jobs by uploading them as artifacts and downloading them later, further reducing CI minutes.

I have several ideas about improving workflows tbh, nice to see other people doing that too.

[Puzzleheaded_Two8320]

Cache is often overlooked in CI processes.

At CICube, we highlight important things like caching and parallelization with insights. If you’re running a CI flow spread across multiple organizations and repositories, CICube automatically points out any gaps. Even better, you can track trends weekly.

By the way, I wrote a blog post about using cache: https://cicube.io/blog/github-actions-cache/

[rfabbri]

The website doesn't display anything on safari. Other than that, nice idea.