Metrics & Definitions
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      CI visibility

      Swarmia provides you with the most important CI metrics for tracking your CI health

      Why it matters

      Keeping the CI fast and robust is essential for good developer experience and fast cycle times. As such, it is important to have good visibility into your CI pipeline, which is what Swarmia's CI insights aim to provide you with.

      Where to find it

      You can find CI metrics under Infrastructure → CI visibility

      How to use it

      You can start from the top-level view by identifying which of your repositories have the busiest / slowest CI pipelines. Then, you can drill down deeper into the repository and into the individual workflows to analyze the run time trends and which part of the workflow is slow.

      When you know what is slowing you down, you can then work to improve the situation.

      Repositories

      The top-level view offers an overview of your repositories’ CI activities:

      • Total CI run time: Total time spent on CI runs per repository. Note: A high total runtime may indicate many CI runs (e.g., due to frequent pull requests), not necessarily slow CI processes.
      • Workflow run time distribution: Visual representation of workflow runtimes. Use this to spot repositories with longer-running workflows.

      ci-repositories

      Workflows

      Click on a repository to view detailed workflow insights.

      • Run time distribution: Shows how long workflows take to run.
      • Typical run (p90): Monitor these trends to detect workflows that are slowing down over time.
      • Failure Rate: High failure rates in testing or linting workflows are normal—they catch issues. High failure rates in deployment workflows may indicate flaky pipelines needing attention.

      ci-workflows

      Jobs

      Within a workflow, click to view its constituent jobs.

      • Jobs: Details each job within the workflow (e.g., testing, linting).
      • Job run time trends (p90, p75, p50): Observe how job runtimes change over time. An upward trend suggests optimization may be needed to prevent slowdowns.

      ci-jobs

      Workflow runs

      • Status: Filter runs by success or failure.
      • Branches: Filter runs by branch name. Helpful when the same workflow behaves differently on different branches (e.g., additional deployment steps on the main branch).

      Click on a specific workflow run to open it in GitHub Actions. Examine logs and steps to diagnose and troubleshoot issues.

      ci-runs

      Video walkthrough

      See the video below for an in-depth walkthrough of the feature:

       

      Metric definitions

      The metrics provided by the CI visibility view are defined as follows:

      Total run time

      This metric tells the total amount of time that the CI has spent running across the grouping of the view (repository, workflow, or job). Run time is calculated from the start of the workflow/job run to its end. Both failures and successes are included.

      Run time percentiles

      On the workflow and job level, we show the p50, p70, and p90 trends of the run time. (p90 = 90% of workflow runs complete below this time.)

      Run time distribution

      We show the distribution of the run times of the runs in the timeframe. For example, how many workflow runs had a run time between 5 to 10 minutes.

      Failure rate

      The percentage of runs that failed. Neutral conclusions (such as skipped or canceled) are not considered failures.