Our jenkins pipelines are quite complex, running several parallel stuff, and we have pretty hard time to analyse which step of the pipeline is doing what, or where to look for console log. BlueOcean gives a better visualisation but since it is somehow unstable on our server and runs very slow currently it is not usable for us.

It would be amazing if it would be possible to add a comment to the most relevant pipeline steps. It would make tracking down problems easier. Just an example a mocked up pipeliene step view:

jglick What do you think about this? Or is there any other possibilities to provide information in the pipeline stepps view? Thank you very much for the help.

stage suffices for most of that.

thank you for your response...
jglick so you mean I should pack each call to sh to stage?
but not all things can go to separate stages especially as we are using parallel steps and there it was written we shouldn't use stages under parallel ....

also stage has the possibility to show several steps of loggs, I guess it would highly improove the readability if there would be a possibility to comment those steps...

so you mean I should pack each call to sh to stage?

Interesting ones, yes, or where appropriate multiple low-level steps in one stage, or nest them as needed etc.

it was written we shouldn't use stages under parallel

Applies only to deprecated stage. stage taking a block may be used freely inside parallel.

Using stages as well would give you very long pipeline view which is so bad specially when you've large number of sh calls

svanoort designed the current version of the Stage View plugin to show all stage steps in the build. My original intention was for it to show only top-level stage steps. At any rate, no one is expecting to update this plugin to show a more refined view; perhaps Blue Ocean will (TBD). For now, the simple built-in Pipeline Steps is the only full-fidelity display.

abanfi I've got a concrete proposal with JENKINS-26522 that would allow adding metadata to steps (for example custom labelling), and includes a PR to enable the functionality – currently waiting on jglick to approve it. That would provide the precursor to what you describe, though it would require additional work to record the additional information to steps and display it.

It's quite clear to me that JENKINS-26107 doesn't help your needs really, unless visualization support for nested stages is added. CC jamesdumay and vivek since it looks like it might be coming up again.

jglick I'm not really sure what you're going on about here, but it sounds like you have some sort of grievance that wasn't voiced previously when design for JENKINS-26107 was happening – I'd encourage you to reach out to talk directly rather than airing it in public JIRAs.

svanoort ack

svanoort Thank you for the comprehensive answer. The JENKINS-26522 looks quite good and is exactly what would help us. I still wonder thet currently there was no need for more detail for analysis. Prehaps our pipeline job is too complex, but it is due to the complexity of our project.

If there is way to drive this forward or anyway I could help just let me know...
I see the future of jenkins in pipelines.... but BlueOcean to come is yet too far away for us....

This is duplicated in JENKINS-37324