We have a bunch of projects where we, after we’ve finished building, automatically create a release.
The lifecycle automatically deploys these releases to dev and stage environments, pending a manual deployment to prod at a suitable moment.
Unfortunately this last step is often forgotten for a while, especially if there is something preventing us from deploying the same afternoon, or last day before a holiday.
I want sort of visible indicator in the octopus dashboard which releases haven’t progressed through the entire lifecycle. Perhaps some sort of configurable lifecycle state/color? So I can configure my lifecycle to highlight a given stage if the release has been stuck there for x minutes/hour/days.
This way I can easily see which apps haven’t been deployed to prod in a while, even when there’s new features in stage. Preferably without having to scan and compare version numbers.
Thanks for reaching out to Octopus Support! This is a very interesting problem you’re encountering, and I can certainly see the value of what you’re proposing.
Unfortunately, as you know, there is no way to modify the Dashboard to suit this need now. If you visit our Octopus Deploy Roadmap page, you can select the + Submit idea button and propose your idea. I can also bring this up internally to see if anything is already on the radar.
As for what we can do now, you could have a scheduled Runbook that queries the Octopus API to find the last release deployed to your prod environment. Looking through our existing script examples, I think this one could be easily modified to return the info you’re looking for. The script as is will return the last time each environment in your projects has been deployed to.
Checking Project: Release Testing
Last Successful Release in Production: 2023-04-13T16:37:31.265+00:00
Last Successful Release in Development: 2023-04-13T16:37:42.157+00:00
Last Successful Release in Staging: 2023-04-13T16:37:56.766+00:00
Last Successful Release in QA: 2023-04-13T16:37:49.220+00:00
This is still more manual than displaying on the dashboard but could help give visibility to whether an environment hasn’t been deployed to in some time. Let me know your thoughts or if you have any questions.
Cool, I’ll have a look at that runbook. I can probably get it to send a periodic slack reminder with “stale deployments”. It would certainly be useful for us.
