On a Jenkins instance with the "Monitoring" plugin installed, there is a graph with the following title: Waiting in build queue (s) on the page at https://YOURJENKINS/monitoring/nodes.
What does this global metric (in seconds) actually represent, seeing as there could be any number of builds on the queue?
On a Jenkins instance with the "Monitoring" plugin installed, there is a graph with the following title: Waiting in build queue (s) on the page at https://YOURJENKINS/monitoring/nodes.
What does this global metric (in seconds) actually represent, seeing as there could be any number of builds on the queue?
It is the instantaneous total number of seconds that all currently-queued builds have been waiting, i.e. the sum of "time since added to the queue" for all builds on the queue.
Perhaps it is obvious in retrospect (I'm not sure what else it could be) but it was not clear to me initially so hopefully this helps someone.
In fact I wasn't sure until I looked at the commits which added this feature, see this one in monitoring-plugin and then this one in javamelody.
This means that the values can seem unexpectedly high, e.g. if 15 builds suddenly land on the queue, but all executors are busy for the next 10 minutes, this metric will rise up to 15 [builds] x 10 [minutes] x 60 [seconds] = 9000 seconds (150 mins) which can look like a worryingly high number when you see it on a monitoring graph - until you realise that it is a sum rather than a single elapsed time.
