Thread deployment finished/failed messages to the deployment started message
The #announcements
channel receives deploy announcements like these:
But because they're individual messages, it can make it hard to find related messages. Say for example that a deploy to gstg-cny
failed, and you want to look at the diff for that package. You have to find the matching "started" message, and then view the thread.
To keep related messages together, we should use Slack threads (via the thread_ts
parameter), like we do with compare messages:
The downside to that strategy is that you'd only see the "started" messages and might miss a "failed" or "completed" message. To work around that we can use the reply_broadcast
parameter to also send the message to the main channel, keeping existing behavior. You'd still get the "fire hose" aspect of deploy messages, but finding related deploys or announcements gets much easier.
We might even want to extend this out to thread per coordinated pipeline, so that we can see the progress of one package through all environments.
Implementation
Deployment finished/failed messages are now threaded to the deployment started message, as well as being broadcast to the #announcements
channel. This change is behind the send_notification_to_started_notification_thread
feature flag: https://ops.gitlab.net/gitlab-org/release/tools/-/feature_flags/219/edit.