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Last updated: 10 Jun 2020

Deployment dashboards

Deployment Dashboards

There are a number of applications with a dashboard showing useful information for the deployment process.

They can be found in Grafana, and they are all named “Application dashboard - application name”, such as Application dashboard - Whitehall.

The existing deployment dashboards are written by Puppet every 30 minutes and loaded when Grafana starts. Don’t change them directly.

You can also see further tips on how we use Graphite to present the data below.

Change the Dashboards

Each dashboard panel is configured by a .json.erb template in Puppet and these are combined to generate the JSON config for each application dashboard.

You can export the entire dashboard by clicking on the cog:

Dashboard JSON

Or you can export a single panel by clicking on the panel title to add it to a partial:

Panel JSON

Please delete any temporary dashboards after you’ve finished.

If you’re adding a new panel

Create a new partial in Puppet with the exported JSON Replace any application specific text/urls/queries in the partial with template variables.

govuk-puppet uses an array structure to dynamically control which partials are rendered.

Adding your partial name to this structure will result in it being rendered in Grafana.

Add a new application

The list of applications that have dashboards generated is stored in the hiera data inside Puppet under grafana::dashboards::deployment_applications.

Each dashboard can have parameters associated with it which affect how the dashboard is generated.

Parameters:

  • has_workers: Adds a row with worker failure and success panels. This is required for applications that have Sidekiq workers. Defaults to false.

  • show_controller_errors: Adds a row which graphs 5XX responses broken down by Rails controller and action. For this graph to contain data, the application must report response statuses to Kibana as status, and also report the controller and action as controller and action. You may wish to set this to false for apps with very low request rates to avoid having an empty and potentially confusing graph. Defaults to true.

  • show_slow_requests: Adds a row which graphs response times broken down by Rails controller. For this graph to contain data, the application must report response times to Kibana as duration and the controller as controller. You may wish to set this to false for apps with very low request rates to avoid having an empty and potentially confusing graph. Defaults to true.

  • docs_name: This is the name of the application used in the developer documentation. Often the same as the repository name on GitHub. This defaults to the app_name.

  • error_threshold: The threshold at which application errors are highlighted in red. Defaults to 50.

  • warning_threshold: The threshold at which application errors are highlighted in orange. Defaults to 25.

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