Talaiot

Talaiot is a simple and extensible plugin targeting teams using Gradle Build System. It records the duration of your Gradle tasks helping to understand problems of the build and detecting bottlenecks. For every record, it will add additional information defined by default or custom metrics.

Some of the features are:

• Integration with Time/Series systems
• Extensible definition of metrics depending on the requirements.
• Definition of custom publishers
• Develop it entirely with Kotlin
• Generation Task Dependency Graph for the build

What is Talaiot?

"... while some certainly had a defensive purpose, the use of others is not clearly understood. Some believe them to have served the purpose of lookout or signalling towers..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaiot

Setup Plugin

Include in the classpath the latest version of Talaiot:

classpath("com.cdsap:talaiot:<latest_version>")

Apply the plugin:

plugins {
    id("talaiot")
}

Check this article to see how to setup Talaiot with Groovy(all the examples in the README are in KTS.

Basic configuration

talaiot {
    publishers {
        influxDbPublisher {
            dbName = "tracking"
            url = "http://localhost:8086"
            taskMetricName = "task"
            buildMetricName = "build"
        }

    }
    filter {
        threshold {
            minExecutionTime = 10
        }
    }
}

This example adds the InfluxDbPublisher with the information of the InfluxDb Server where it will be posted the information tracked. Additionally, we are disabling the metrics for Git and Performance.

Talaiot Extension

Property	Description
logger	Mode for logging (Silent,Info)
ignoreWhen	Configuration to ignore the execution of Talaiot
generateBuildId	Generation of unique identifier for each execution(disabled by default)
publishers	Configuration to define where to submit the information of the build
metrics	Additional information tracked during the execution of the task
filter	Rules to filter the tasks to be reported

Publishers

In terms of publishing Talaiot includes some default Publishers, but at the same time you can extend it and create your publisher for your requirements

Predefined Publishers

Property	Description
OutputPublisher	Publish the results of the build on the console, this Publisher will only print the task name and duration
InfluxDbPublisher	Publish the results of the build to the InfluxDb database defined in the configuration
TaskDependencyGraphPublisher	Publish the results of the build using the dependency graph of the tasks executed
PushGatewayGraphPublisher	Publish the results of the build to the PushGateway server defined in the configuration
JsonPublisher	Publish the results of the build with a json format
TimelinePublisher	Publish the results of the build decompose by the different workers used in the execution

InfluxDbPublisher

Talaiot will send to the InfluxDb server defined in the configuration the values collected during the execution

Property	Description
dbName	Name of the database
url	Url of the InfluxDb Server
taskMetricName	Name of the metric used for specific task in the execution
buildMetricName	Name of the metric used for the overall information of the build in the execution
username	username which is used to authorize against the influxDB instance (optional)
password	password for the username which is used to authorize against the influxDB (optional)
retentionPolicyConfiguration	retention policy which is used for writing points

TaskDependencyGraphPublisher

Talaiot will generate the Task Dependency Graph in the specific format specified in the configuration

Property	Description
ignoreWhen	Configuration to ignore the execution of the publisher
html	Export the task dependency graph in Html format with support of vis.js
gexf	Export the task dependency graph in gexf format
dot	Export the task dependency graph in png format. See Graphviz

This new category of publishers does not require constantly evaluating the builds, that's why there is an extra parameter configuration in the Publisher to ignore the execution unless there is some property enabled. Typical use case is use this publisher and collect the files on CI.

The output will be found "${project.rootDir}/talaiot:

Example:

PushGatewayPublisher

Talaiot will send to the PushGateway server defined in the configuration the values collected during the execution.

Property	Description
jobName	Name of the job required to be exported to Prometheus
url	Url of the PushGateway Server

JsonPublisher

Talaiot will Publish the results of the build with a json format .

    publishers {
        jsonPublisher = true
   
    }

TimelinePublisher

Talaiot will create a PNG file with the detailed information in chronological order by task of the execution in the different workers.

    publishers {
        timelinePublisher = true
   
    }

Custom Publishers

Talaiot allows using custom Publishers defined by the requirements of your environment, in case you are using another implementation. Check here how to define a custom publisher

Metrics

If you need to add more information on the builds you can add more metrics under the customMetrics on the MetricsConfiguration

talaiot {
    metrics {
        customMetrics( "versionApp" to $version,
                       "customProperty" to getCustomProperty() 
                      )
    }
}

Filters

For every measurement done, Talaiot can filter the tasks tracked to be published. These filters don't apply to GraphPublishers:

Property	Description
tasks	Configuration used to filter which tasks we want to exclude and include in the execution
module	Configuration used to filter which modules we want to exclude and include in the execution
threshold	Configuration used to define time execution ranges to filter tasks to be reported

Example:

 filter {
     tasks {
         excludes = arrayOf("preDebugBuild", "processDebugResources")
     }
     modules {
         excludes = arrayOf(":app")
     }
     threshold {
         minExecutionTime = 10
     }
 }

IgnoreWhen

Property	Description
envName	Name of the Property
envValue	Value of the Property

We will use IgnoreWhen when we want to ignore publishing the results of the build. One use case is to ignore it when we are building on CI:

talaiot {
    ignoreWhen {
        envName = "CI"
        envValue = "true"
    }
}

Example: Analyzing Data provided by Talaiot

Docker, InfluxDb and Grafana

To have a quick setup to see the possibilities of Talaiot we are providing a Docker image to setup a Grafana + InfluxDb instances(based on this great repo).

Additionally, the Docker image is creating a default database, a provisioned dashboard and the default datasource for InfluxDb. The source is here:

To run the Docker Image:

docker run -d \
  -p 3003:3003 \
  -p 3004:8083 \
  -p 8086:8086 \
  -p 22022:22 \
  -v /var/lib/influxdb \
  -v /var/lib/grafana \
  cdsap/talaiot:latest

You can access to the local instance of Grafana:

http://localhost:3003 root/root

Populating data

If you access to the provisioned Dashboard included in the Docker Image(http://localhost:3003/d/F9jppxQiz/android-task-tracking?orgId=1), you will see an empty dashboard like:

To see Talaiot in action, you need to populate the data. We are providing a script to populate data based in this example repository: https://github.com/cdsap/TalaiotClientExample

This repository includes the InfluxDbPubluser configuration pointing to the InfluxDb and datastore defined in the Docker image:

talaiot {
    publishers {
        influxDbPublisher {
                    dbName = "tracking"
                    url = "http://localhost:8086"
                    taskMetricName = "task"
                    buildMetricName = "build"
        }
    }
}

You can execute the script:

bash scripts/populate.sh

The script will download the repository and with the help of Gradle Profiler(https://github.com/gradle/gradle-profiler) will trigger number of builds defined in the scenario file:

    assemble {
    tasks = ["clean"]
    }
    clean_build {
    versions = ["5.1","4.10.2"]
    tasks = ["assembleDebug"]
    gradle-args = ["--parallel"]
    cleanup-tasks = ["clean"]
    run-using = cli
    warm-ups = 20
    }

Once is finished you can check the results on the Grafana Dashboard http://localhost:3003/d/F9jppxQiz/android-task-tracking?orgId=1

Other Plugins

Talaiot is not a new idea. There are multiple awesome plugins to use to achieve same results:

• Gradle Enterprise: If you are using Gradle Enterprise Talaiot is useless because the aggregation is great and you have the support from Gradle :)

• Build Time Tracker by Pascal Hartig(@passy).

• Kuronometer Plugin developed with Scala and FP concepts by Pedro Vicente Gómez Sánchez(@pedrovgs)

Docs

Docs

Articles

Understanding Talaiot

Exploring the InfluxDbPublisher in Talaiot

Graphs, Gradle and Talaiot

Contributing

Talaiot is Open Source and accepts contributions of new Publishers, Metrics and Dashboards that we can include as provisioned ones in the Docker image.

Contributors

• Anton Malinskiy: New format metrics, rework InfluxdbPublisher and new Publishers Json and Timeline.

• Sergey Rybalkin

• Satyarth Sampath

• Iñaki Villar

Thanks

Pascal Hartig, Build Time Tracker it was an inspiration to build this plugin.

Bintray release plugin plugin by Novoda

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Graphviz-java Library

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