Learning GitHub Actions

Chapter 10. Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging

At this point, you are hopefully comfortable with how to create, use, and manage GitHub Actions workflows, actions, and related pieces—when everything goes as planned. But what about those times when you need to quickly navigate through results, find more details, debug failures, or all of the above? No book on a new technology is complete without information on what to do, and where to look, when you need to dig deeper and/or things aren’t working. That’s the purpose of this chapter.

In this chapter, I’ll cover some of the built-in ways you can do the following:

• Gain more observability into what is happening with your workflows
• Work with previous runs of workflows
• Work with the framework’s debugging functionality to troubleshoot problems
• Customize log data and job summaries

Once you understand these techniques, you’ll be able to find the crucial data generated during the processing of your workflow and understand it at a deeper and more insightful level.

Gaining More Observability

Observability can have a wide array of definitions. But the general goal of observability is always the same—to be able to quickly and easily identify and find the information you need about the current state of a process or system.

With GitHub Actions, there are a number of high-level ways to get that observability. At the most basic is the status output that is provided in GitHub through the integration with the Actions menu. While some of this has ...