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We currently use Cradiator to display the status of our continuous integration (CI) builds from CruseControl.net, on a 42" Samsung television on display high-up in our IT department.

Cradiator is a great starting place, but we're getting to the point whereby we're having lots of projects on there and it's starting to get a bit 'full'.

What I'd like to know is, what do you use to display your build statuses? Custom software? Off the shelf stuff? etc. Alternatively, I'm looking for ideas on how we improve on Cradiator.

Brett Rigby
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7 Answers7

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I use Hudson, and when I have a chance to dedicate a monitor to it, I'm going to start with this:

http://wiki.hudson-ci.org//download/attachments/37323554/Hudson_1.jpg

http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Radiator+View+Plugin

... after all, if they're green, they don't need to take up much screen space, do they? Imagine if they were all green. People would be just as happy (and just as informed) if it showed a big checkmark and nothing else. So you only really need to highlight the failing ones. Cradiator looks skinnable, and you're already using it, so that's the first thing I would try.

Zac Thompson
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  • Actually, when everything is green it is nice to see that things are still building (with progress bars). Better to show green, but rank red higher, so projects that are green just drop off the bottom. CI-Eye does exactly that :-) https://github.com/netmelody/ci-eye/wiki – Tom Aug 27 '11 at 18:15
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I mentioned several solutions for Hudson in a previous answer:

There are many solutions (all links below point to working solutions with Hudson or existing plugins):

Check out the other Build notifiers plugins for more ideas.

Personally, I have experienced the bunny, lava lamps, orbs and the radiator view. They all do the job but I have a little preference for the lava lamps. As Jeffrey mentioned in another answer, it's indeed funny to race against the wax to fix a build failure :)

We're currently using the Radiator View that includes now the modifications mentioned in this comment. It's use the space in a very neat way and does a perfect job, even when you have a lots of projects. It's just great.

alt text
(source: hudson-ci.org)

Check the link for more screenshots. I miss lava lamps a bit (because they are fun) but the Radiator View provides better feedback IMO.

Glorfindel
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Pascal Thivent
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A good option for continuous integration radiator is Buildron (Mac & Win).

Its supports a lot of builds in same screen, as you can see:

enter image description here

And you can filter builds using a remote control (iOS & Android).

j0k
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giacomelli
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One idea (and Cradiator does have an issue tracker item for it) is to only showing broken builds.

Another idea, is to monitor multiple configuration sets and switch/fade between them at a set interval.

Our team has 12 projects to monitor, but to get around the clutter we currently have 1 machine with 2 monitors connected. Each monitor has an instance of Cradiator running on it. Doing this and using the RegEx Project Filter feature in Cradiator we show 5 projects on one monitor and a different 7 on the other. This should keep us going until about 15 projects, when the clutter will start to gang up on us again.

Cradiator is open source and the 'skin' concept is relatively isolated, just waiting for you to get your hands dirty in the source code!

In fact, I have just moved the source code for Cradiator to GitHub for a more flexible approach to sharing each other's work. Fork away.

PandaWood
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One of the primary goals of radiating build status information into a room is to get developers to respond to broken builds and fix them. Quickly working out who might be responsible for a failing build is important.

What I have experienced first hand at my company is that processing check-in comments and displaying pictures of the users contributing to a build is very effective way of getting developers to react to build failures. People seem to respond to their face on a red bar, and others don't have to be so distracted.

With this in mind, I have developed a standalone build radiator web-app that talks to Jenkins and TeamCity over their REST APIs. CI-Eye is trivial to set up, and will probably give you better results in the workplace than many other plug-ins and radiator apps. Give it a try, and let me know what you think -- I'm quite actively improving it, and welcome any feedback.

CI-Eye is free and open source -- see the CI-Eye wiki for more details.

CI-Eye screenshot

Tom
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If projects depend on each other somehow or if you can assign some priority (business value?), then I would consider some tree or a map kind of stuff. For 100+ projects it really should be more visible which greens/reds are more important than others. Myself I'm using just the structured web dashboard + systray. Not even email.

easyCIS
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Brett, actually Cradiator just added a feature called MultiView to Cradiator - which is one way of fixing your problem of having too many projects showing.

So you can split your projects between separate "views". A view is the combination of URL/Skin & Project Filters.

Each view is shown on a rotation cycle every poll interval (default 30 seconds)

For example, if you have 12 projects, you can set 2 views which show only 6 each. See the Release Notes for v2.8 for details.

The show only breaking builds feature has been added as well.

alt text

PandaWood
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