Coin glossary for Grafana users
This article explains the glossary related to COIN, the Qt Company Continuous Integration system, from a Grafana user’s perspective. It provides a basic understanding of COIN terminology that is helpful for correctly interpreting metrics, dashboards, and trends. The page presents a simplified view of COIN concepts as they appear in Grafana and intentionally omits internal implementation details. For deeper technical explanations, see the references listed in Further reading.
A task represents a single CI job scheduled either by a user or by agents. Every task has a specific type, such as:
- Integration
- Early warning
- Status check
- Nightly and Healthchecks
Task types are labeled in the COIN web interface, they have distinct icons, and the same categorization (for example, Integration vs. Status check) also appears in different tables across Grafana dashboards. Status checks are jobs scheduled by users directly on coin web, Early warning are pre-checks scheduled from Gerrit. Integrations are tasks in which actual qt code is attempted to be integrated. HealtCheck are special tusks run every night, it builds and tests the latest qt5.git and all submodules on their last submodule-updated SHA-1s.
See related dashboards:
Things Gone Wrong in last HealthCheck
For most flaky test statistics, only test results from integrations tasks are typically considered.
ach task has a unique task id, which serves as its identifier. This id can be used to construct a URL that shows the status and results of a COIN task, following the pattern:
https://testresults.qt.io/coin/integration/qt/{module_name}/tasks/{task_id}
for example:
https://testresults.qt.io/coin/integration/qt/qt5/tasks/nightly1767303902
Here, <code>qt5</code> is the <code>module_name</code> and <code>nightly1767303902</code> is the <code>task_id</code>..
Tasks urls can be found in panels providing detailed information about test runs (see picture).
Workitems
A task can contain one or more subtasks called workitems.
Workitems represent a set of jobs and are roughly categorized into three types:
- Provision
- Build
- Test
Workitem States
Each workitem has a state that describes its current status or final outcome. Possible states include:
- Done – completed successfully
- Running – currently in progress
- Cancelled – manually stopped before completion
- Waiting for hardware
- Failed – encountered some sort of execution error
- Error – any failure outside of the VM running instructions
- Timeout
- Insignificant – does not affect the overall task result
Some platforms in COIN are marked as insignificant, meaning build or test workitmes do not return fail and have no impact on result of integrations containing those workitems.
Insignificant = relates to build and test workitems in case of failure - the state is “Insignificant” not “Failed” and they do not stop integration,
InsignificantTests = relates only to test workitems. (test workitem will have status ‘Insignificant’ in case of failure).
Test workitems contain test execution logs.and
Classification of tests:
blacklisted, skipped, flaky, crashed, failed
informaiton about data tas
Further reading.