deprecated

Installation guide

This guide describes how to set up Four Keys with your GitHub or GitLab project. The main steps are:

1. Running the setup script
2. Integrating with your GitHub or Git Lab repo by:
   1. Collecting changes data
   2. Collecting deployment data
   3. Collecting incident data

Before you begin

1. Install GCloud SDK.
2. You must be owner on a Google Cloud project that has billing enabled. You may either use this project to house the architecture for the Four Keys, or you will be given the option to create new projects. If you create new projects, the original Google Cloud project will NOT be altered during set up, but the billing information from this parent project will be applied to any projects created.

Running the setup script

1. Once you have your Google Cloud project, run the following setup script from the top-level directory of this repository:

   gcloud config set project $PARENT_PROJECT_ID
   cd setup
   ./setup.sh 2>&1 | tee setup.log

2. Answer the setup script's questions:

   • Would you like to create a new Google Cloud Project for the four key metrics? (y/n)
     • If you choose no, you will be asked to input and confirm the ID of the project that you want to use.
   • Are you using GitLab? (y/n)
     • If you choose yes, the GitLab specific Pub/Sub topic, subscriptions, and worker will be created.
   • Are you using GitHub? (y/n)
     • If you choose yes, the GitHub specific Pub/Sub topic, subscriptions, and worker will be created.
   • BigQuery setup
     • If you've never setup BigQuery before, a setup page will open in your browser.
   • Would you like to create a separate new project to test deployments for the four key metrics? (y/n)
     • You have the option of creating a new Google Cloud project to test out doing deployments and seeing how they are tracked in the dashboard. However, if you already have a project with deployments, you may select no to skip this step. You do not need to select yes to generate mock data.
   • Would you like to generate mock data? (y/n)
     • If you select yes, a script will run through and send mock GitLab or GitHub events to your event-handler. This will populate your dashboard with mock data. The mock data will include the work "mock" in the source. You can generate mock data without using the setup script. See Generating mock data.

New Google Cloud projects

If you've chosen to create new Google Cloud projects, after the script finishes you will have an env.sh file specifying two new project-id's in the form of fourkeys-XXXX and helloworld-XXXXX. The fourkeys-XXXX project is home to all the services that collect data from your deployments, while helloworld-XXXX is the staging and prod deployments for your example application.

If you ever want to remove the newly created projects and all associated data, you can run cleanup.sh. Only do this when you are done experimenting with Four Keys entirely, or want to start over. Running cleanup.sh will remove the projects and all the collected data.

If you want to bulk delete many projects that you've created via the setup script, all of which will be named fourkeys-XXXX and helloworld-XXXXX, pass a flag to the cleanup script: ./cleanup.sh -b

The setup explained

The setup script does many things to help create the service architecture described in the README.md. The script will output the commands you would otherwise need to do manually.

The steps are:

• Create randomly generated project names
• Creates an env.sh and saves the project values in it
• Set up Four Keys project
  • Create project
  • Link billing to parent project
  • Enable APIs
  • Add IAM Policy Bindings
  • Create Pub/Sub Topics
  • Deploy Event Handler
  • Deploy BigQuery GitHub and/or GitLab Worker
  • Deploy BigQuery Cloud Build Worker
  • Create BigQuery Pub/Sub Subscriptions
  • Create BigQuery Dataset, Tables, and Scheduled Queries
• Set up Helloworld project
  • Create Google Cloud project
  • Link billing to parent project
  • Enable APIs
  • Deploy Helloworld to staging
  • Deploy Helloworld to prod
• Generate mock data using the scripts found in the data_generator/ directory
• Connect to the DataStudio Dashboard template
  • Select organization and project
  • Click Create Report on the next screen with the list of fields

Integrating with a live repo

The setup script can create mock data, but it cannot integrate automatically with live projects. To measure your team's performance, you need to integrate to your live GitHub or GitLab repo that has ongoing deployments. You can then measure the four key metrics, and experiment with how changes, successful deployments, and failed deployments affect your metrics.

To integrate Four Keys with a live repo, you need to:

1. Collect changes data
2. Collect deployment data
3. Collect incident data

Collecting changes data

GitHub instructions

1. Start with your GitHub repo
   • If you're using the Helloworld sample, fork the demo by navigating to the GitHub Repo and clicking Fork.
2. Navigate to your repo (or forked repo) and click Settings.
3. Select Webhooks from the left hand side.
4. Click Add Webhook.
5. Get the Event Handler endpoint for your Four Keys service:

   . ./env.sh
   gcloud config set project ${FOURKEYS_PROJECT}
   gcloud run services describe event-handler --platform managed --region ${FOURKEYS_REGION} --format=yaml | grep url | head -1 | sed -e 's/  *url: //g'

6. In the Add Webhook interface use the Event Handler endpoint for Payload URL.
7. Run the following command to get the secret from Google Secrets Manager:

   gcloud secrets versions access 1 --secret="event-handler"

8. Put the secret in the box labelled Secret.
9. For Content Type, select application/json.
10. Select Send me everything.
11. Click Add Webhook.

GitLab instructions

1. Navigate to your repo and click Settings.
2. Select Webhooks from the menu.
3. Get the Event Handler endpoint for your Four Keys service by running the following:

   . ./env.sh
   gcloud config set project ${FOURKEYS_PROJECT}
   gcloud run services describe event-handler --platform managed --region ${FOURKEYS_REGION} --format=yaml | grep url | head -1 | sed -e 's/  *url: //g'

4. For Payload URL, use the Event Handler endpoint.
5. Run the following command to get the secret from Google Secrets Manager:

   gcloud secrets versions access 1 --secret="event-handler"

6. Put the secret in the box labelled Secret Token.
7. Select all the checkboxes.
8. Leave the Enable SSL verification selected.
9. Click Add Webhook.

Collecting deployment data

Configuring Cloud Build to deploy on GitHub Pull Request merges

1. Go back to your repo's main page.
2. At the top of the GitHub page, click Marketplace.
3. Search for Cloud Build.
4. Select Google Cloud Build.
5. Click Set Up Plan.
6. Click Set up with Google Cloud Build.
7. Select Only select repositories.
8. Fill in your forked repo.
9. Log in to Google Cloud Platform.
10. Add your new Four Keys project named fourkeys-XXXXX.
11. Select your repo.
12. Click Connect repository.
13. Click Create push trigger.

And now, whenever a pull request is merged into master of your fork, Cloud Build will trigger a deploy into prod and data will flow into your Four Keys project.

Configuring Cloud Build to deploy on GitLab merges

1. Go to your Four Keys project and create a service account called gitlab-deploy.
2. Create a JSON service account key for your gitlab-deploy service account.
3. In your GitLab repo, navigate to Settings on the left-hand menu and then select CI/CD.
4. Save your account key under variables.
   1. In the key field, input SERVICE_ACCOUNT.
   2. In the Value field, input the JSON .
   3. Select Protect variable.
5. Save your Google Cloud project-id under variables.
   1. In the key field, input PROJECT_ID.
   2. In the value field, input your project-id.
6. Add a .gitlab-ci.yml file to your repo.

   image: google/cloud-sdk:alpine
   
   deploy_production:
     stage: deploy
     environment: Production
     only:
     - master
     script:
     - echo $SERVICE_ACCOUNT > /tmp/$CI_PIPELINE_ID.json
     - gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file /tmp/$CI_PIPELINE_ID.json
     - gcloud builds submit . --project $PROJECT_ID
     after_script:
     - rm /tmp/$CI_PIPELINE_ID.json
   

This setup will trigger a deployment on any push to the master branch.

Collecting incident data

Four Keys uses GitLab and/or GitHub issues to track incidents.

Creating an incident

1. Open an issue.
2. Add the tag Incident.
3. In the body of the issue, input root cause: {SHA of the commit}.

When the incident is resolved, close the issue. Four Keys will measure the incident from the time of the deployment to when the issue is closed.