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

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:3003"
            urlMetric = "tracking"
        }

    }
    metrics {
        gitMetrics = false
        performanceMetrics = false
    }
}

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
publishers	Configuration to define where to submit the information of the build
metrics	Additional information tracked during the execution of the task

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

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
urlMetric	Name of the metric used in the execution

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

For every measurement done, Talaiot adds metrics to help you later to analyze the data and detect problems. Metrics are categorized by different configurations. The Default Configuration of Metrics includes:

Property	Description
baseMetrics	Collects information about the project, build, OS Id and user
gitMetrics	Metrics related to the Git configuration of the project
performanceMetrics	Metrics related to the Java arguments defined on the Gradle Build.
gradleMetrics	Metrics related to Gradle arguments

By default all the metrics are available but if you want to disable some group define the configuration like:

  metrics {
        gitMetrics = false
        perfomanceMetrics = false
  }

Check the Wiki to know more about the existing metrics

Extending 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() 
                      )
    }
}

IgnoreWhen

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

We will use IgnoreWhebn 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 + Inlfluxdb 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:3003"
            urlMetric = "tracking"
        }

    }
}

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)

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.

Thanks

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

Anton Malinskiy.

Vacxe / Talaiot