More job list tabs

Features Requests
1

On the individual build page, there is this Job List filter that can between all and failures,

Screenshot_20230630_215159
Screenshot_20230630_215159744×62 3.8 KB

It would be nice if this supported more job states. In particular, in the case there are many jobs and many jobs waiting on agents, it would be nice to select only the waiting jobs, so it’s easier to figure out in aggregate why they might all be waiting.

2

Hey @jl-applied!

Thanks for your feedback!

The intention of this tab is so folks can see what is causing their build to not pass in a clearer view so they can target fixing those issues, rather than scrolling through a list of all jobs and trying to find the red ones.

One of the pieces of feedback we got from this was that it occasionally would cause confusion if a job was “failed” but then, while one was looking in to that job, someone else retried it and it moved back to the main list, if it passed on retry then it magically disappeared from the investigator’s view.

With “Waiting” and other such statuses, the same would be true; it would only be in the “Waiting” tab until it wasn’t waiting anymore. Theoretically, all jobs are initially “waiting”, so that tab would be populated with the entire pipeline then reduced in size as jobs were picked up.

So, I’m wondering what the value of such a tab would be? Do you think that tab would be a focal point over the “All” tab while a pipeline is running?

Cheers!

3

The intention of this tab is so folks can see what is causing their build to not pass

In my case, what was causing my build to not pass were waiting jobs :)

I share sympathies with the “failed” jobs UX sentiments. I personally would like to see the entire build state reset on job retry (my org has an “automatic retries” via the buildkite api for when our spot instances terminate, so we hit this a decent amount + this state propagates back to Github which further compounds confusion), but not necessarily my intentions here.

Do you think that tab would be a focal point over the “All” tab while a pipeline is running?

Absolutely not. I very much think my use case is with a slightly atypical pipeline setup and even then, I would wager I’d only use this 1 or fewer times a month. If this were implemented, I could see myself getting value from it, but very aware it might be too niche to make a prominent button/dropdown here.

FWIW, I am also a big fan of the https://buildkite.com/organizations/$ORGANIZATION/jobs page for similar cases in dealing with troublesome jobs waiting :)

4

@jl-applied appreciate the reply!

if this is something that’s more of an ad-hoc thing you use then I’d suggest experimenting with the GraphQL API to make the call for you when you need it, something like the below should do the trick.

query {
  pipeline(slug: "$ORG/$PIPELINE"){
    jobs(state: [WAITING, PENDING, LIMITED]) {
      edges {
        node {
          ... on JobTypeCommand{
            build {
              url
            }
            id
            uuid
            url
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

You could make this dynamic or even scripted and have the output displayed as an annotation if you wanted.

Regarding the additional tab, I can definitely raise it, but if it’s something that you think you’d use once a month or so and that your use of the UI is atypical then I don’t foresee it being something we’d look at implementing this year.

Cheers and hope the GraphQL query gets you some of the way to what you’re aiming to see!