Announcing Run Logs for Developer Self-service Actions

Introduction

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Self-service actions are a way for developers to win back independence and rid themselves from the need to message DevOps or open tickets in order to request anything infrastructure related. 

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Port’s no-code internal developer portal offers all sorts of developer self-service actions, from setting up an ephemeral environment with a TTL to provisioning cloud resources or scaffolding a microservice. We also provide the UI that helps make the experience as smooth and product-like as possible. But a self-service action is also a complex process interacting with engineering infrastructure. It takes time to run and can generate errors while running. For a real product-like experience, developers need an indication that the action is indeed running, has ended or has produced an error. They also need to see the right logs, and not go hunting for them in tools that they aren’t familiar with. 

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Run logs help bridge the gap - saving the developer the need to directly have access to the cloud provider or CI platform where the action is running or where the logs exist, while still gaining visibility into the background process that was triggered, its progress and results.

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Live logs

Finding the correct logs in devops tools (Jenkins etc) is difficult for developers. In the below view we show how the relevant logs are pulled into Port to make developer lives easier. What exactly is shown is selected by the platform engineer as they set up Port.

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In-progress indication of an action run

Below you can see an entity that was created with a self-service action (a request to setup a developer environment). We can see that the entity’s status is “in progress” and on the right hand side we can see the exact phase the setup is in.

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