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importer-labs/azure_devops/valet-forecast-lab.md
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Forecast Azure DevOps usage using Valet's forecast command

In this lab we will use the forecast command to forecast potential GitHub Actions usage by computing metrics from the historical pipeline data in Azure DevOps. The metrics will be stored on disk in a markdown file and include job metrics for execution time, queue time, and concurrency. We will look at each of these metrics in more depth later in this lab.

Prerequisites

TBD

Prepare for forecast

Before we can run the forecast we need to answer a few questions so we can construct the correct command.

  1. What is the date we want to start forecasting from? 2022-03-02. This should be a date that will give enough data to get a good understanding of the typical usage.
  2. Where do we want to store the results? ./tmp/forecast_reports. This can be any valid path on the system, but for simplicity it is recommend to use a directory in the root of the codespace workspace.

Using these answers our command becomes:

gh valet forecast azure-devops --output-dir ./tmp/forecast_reports --start-date "2022-03-02" 

Perform a forecast

Instead of using the command generated in the previous step. We will instead use a different one that will forecast using data previously generated.

The reason for this is that it is very likely that the ADO project generated for the Valet labs does not have any pipelines that have ran and probably no runners available. So rather than setting up runners and triggering pipelines we will instead use the --source-file option of the forecast command. If you would like you can try the command above, it will likely return "no jobs"

Review forecast report

 

Metric Definitions

Name Description
Median The middle value
P90 90% of the values are less than or equal to
Min The lowest value
Max The highest value

Total Section

Runner Group Sections

  • The preceding sections shows the same metrics as the Total section, but are broken out into runner groups. A runner group is a logical grouping of one or more runners.

Forecasting multiple providers

Next steps