Concourse: Build-level notes/commenting

[Lindsayauchin]

Combining several issues around commenting on builds into one Proposal for feedback from the community.

Feature Request

Users would like to be able to add comments to builds.

Based on community feedback and what we have observed with our users this will minimize duplicate efforts to investigate red builds and confusion around common pains we are hearing such as: 'who paused a build?', 'is this just a flaky test', 'is someone working on this?' etc.

Use Case: I would like to be able to inform my team why a build is red and be able to distinguish between documented reds and any new red builds.

Related issues here:

• Feature Request: I would like the ability to leave a comment on a (failed) build #476
• Notes on builds #380
• Comments on builds #1470

A Modest Proposal

• [ ] Comments are associated with one specific build
• [ ] Comments are freeform text
• [ ] Comments live in a side drawer
• [ ] Add button to expand and collapse drawer to top navigation bar

[ljfranklin]

Thanks for putting this together @Lindsayauchin! Our team is really feeling the pain around this missing feature in Concourse. We've resorted to typing notes into a spreadsheet and adding a link to the build, doesn't feel great.

Has a search box for comments been discussed? For example, an engineer adds a comment that the build failed due to "502 error from LB". It would be amazing to be able to search to see if that same failure was added as a comment on a previous build.

[mkuratczyk]

A separate feature but related to the same problem (wasting time debugging issues we've seen before) would be ability to search the output of all builds for a given job (filters welcome - for example - search failed builds only). The obvious next step would be automated search - when a build fails Concourse would tell me _hey, build #XYZ failed with the same error; here's the comment from that build_. I hope we'll get that one day... :)

[o-orand]

Commenting build sounds great. Maybe it could be extended to resources and jobs. Theses items can be paused, or give pipeline usage informations for job manually triggerd. A tooltip could be use to display such notes.
Maybe it's should go to it's own issue...