Supporting a large development team with hundreds of jobs executing a day, you should expect that some of those are going to fail. It could be the build failed because a test did not pass, something went wrong during a deployment, network issues, you name it! Being able to quickly understand why a build failed helps the development team as well as the supporting teams.
The Build Failure Analyzer plugin is a great addition to your Jenkins installation to provide quick and clear feedback about what happened during your aborted, failed, or unstable builds. The plugin works by scanning the build log for user-defined patterns. When you add a new failure cause the plugin allows you to specify a build to run the analysis on, before saving. This helps you ensure that your regex expression is correct and you are matching the lines you’d want to match. The plugin can even go back and run analysis on old builds!
On the build status page there are links directly to anchor points in the build log so you no longer have to search through a ton of lines for where something failed. The plugin has the capabilities of storing the results in MongoDB for analysis and trending. Some suggested things to search for are: compile failures, test failures, and connection timeouts. These may very on your environment. My experience has show these to be very common issues that occur during the build process. Being able to go straight to the error message will help in your troubleshooting and may save time or prevent failures from impacting other builds running in your pipeline.
