Construct Retrospective Analysis Queries for Canary Analysis

Overview

Retrospective analysis is the starting point to creating queries so that you can perform canary analysis on your deployments. The UI gives you a structured way to create a query and test it against previous deployments. When ready, you can export it so that you can add the query to your deploy file easily. Use the Retrospective Analysis UI to help you to construct queries. You can then test those queries by running them against previous deployments. Once you’ve created a query that meets your needs, export it to generate YAML that you can use in your deploy file.

Before you begin

You need to integrate your Metrics provider. See the Integrate a Metrics Provider guide for details.

How to Perform a retrospective analysis

To perform retrospective analysis, you need to provide the following:

• Metrics Provider: The metrics provider that you want to use.
• Analysis Range: The time range that you want to analyze.
• Queries: One or more query templates to use for the analysis. For the query template, you need the following:
  • Name: Provide a descriptive name
  • Upper Limit:
  • Lower Limit:
  • Query Template
• Context: Key/Value pair for the substitutable template variables in your query templates.

Armory supports the following time related variables out of the box:

• armory.startTimeIso8601
• armory.startTimeEpochSeconds
• armory.startTimeEpochMillis
• armory.endTimeIso8601
• armory.endTimeEpochSeconds
• armory.endTimeEpochMillis
• armory.intervalMillis
• armory.intervalSeconds
• armory.promQlStepInterval

You do not need to provide these variables in the context.

In addition to the time related variables, Armory CD-as-a-Service provides an additional set of variables that you must add these manually as part of the context when performing retrospective analysis. They are automatically substituted in queries that are part of your deploy file.

• armory.deploymentId
• armory.applicationName
• armory.environmentName
• armory.replicaSetName

You can also add your own custom variables as key/value pairs. If you want to use these custom variables, you need to add them to strategies.<strategyName>.<strategy>.steps.analysis.context section in your deployment file.

Export and add a query to your deploy file

You can generate the YAML equivalent of your query to use in your deploy file.

1. From the analysis screen, select Go back to Analysis Configuration.
2. Click Export Queries for Armory Deployments. This creates the YAML block for the analysis portion of your deploy file.
3. Insert the YAML block into your deploy file at the bottom.