We are pleased to announce that IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery is introducing a new graphical user experience for Tekton pipelines.

Based on user feedback, this new experience allows you to more quickly accomplish common tasks and identify parts of your pipeline that may need attention. The new interface provides an overview of your triggers and their recent run history, allowing you to more quickly identify runs of interest, patterns of failure, changes in duration and more.

What are pipelines and triggers?

To understand why we created the new interface, it’s necessary to dig into pipelines and triggers in Tekton.

A pipeline is made up of a collection of tasks that can be arranged in a specific order of execution to accomplish your continuous integration (CI) or continuous deployment (CD) flow. In Tekton, each task in a pipeline executes as a pod on your Kubernetes cluster just for the duration of the execution.

A Tekton trigger is a Tekton component that allows you to detect and extract information from events from a variety of sources. You can then instantiate and execute pipelines and tasks based on that information.

Triggers in IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery can take form in the following ways:

• Manual triggers run when you click the Run pipeline button and select the trigger.
• Git repository triggers run when the specified Git event type occurs for the specified Git repo and branch.
• Timed triggers can be set up to run a pipeline or task at a scheduled time.
• Generic webhook triggers run when a POST request that is configured with the secret setting goes to the generic webhook URL.

In the older version of the UI, the pipeline dashboard showed a simple list of every pipeline run (by default, in chronological order). It was difficult to parse the triggering event for the pipeline, and for organizations with multiple pipelines and triggers, it was almost impossible to quickly navigate the interface to find the pipeline run you were looking for:

The new interface provides the opposite approach. Pipeline runs are grouped by the triggering event, and multiple recent runs can be quickly accessed for each event using the recent runs chart. Pipelines can be quickly run from the interface, and there’s minimal need to scroll to find what you’re looking for. The information density is much higher, and it’s easy to check the status of your pipelines and triggers at a glance:

How to use the new UI

Access the new UI from your toolchain’s dashboard by clicking on a delivery pipeline. Your toolchains can be found here.

At a glance, you can see the status of the last pipeline run for each trigger.

Clicking on the trigger name takes you to a page showing all the pipeline runs for that trigger, similar to the previous dashboard UI:

The Recent Runs mini-charts for each trigger show you the status of recent runs graphically—green bars for success, red bars for failed runs. The height of the bar indicates pipeline run time. Hover over each bar to get a summary of the pipeline run. Click on a bar to go to the run details page for that specific pipeline run with task logs:

You can click the Run icon to re-run the pipeline. You have the ability to change any run parameters. Favoriting a trigger allows you to keep the trigger at the top of the dashboard page.

Finally, the additional menu at the end of each row allows you to edit, disable/enable, duplicate or delete the trigger:

Next steps

Currently, you can opt into the new design via the banner announcing the new design, or via the toggle on the Other settings page. You can also switch back to the legacy design either via the banner or via the toggle on the Advanced settings page.

Note that all users will be automatically switched to the new design after 30 July 2023. The option to switch back to the legacy design will be removed.

We’ll be continuing to add new features, but if you’d like to share any feedback with us or suggest additional capabilities you’d like to see, you can reach out to the IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery development team by joining us on Slack.

Additional resources

• Access the IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery documentation
• Get started with IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery