Beaker Usage Report Emails¶

Abstract¶

Currently, the Beaker usage reminder system sends users a separate email for every system they have reserved. This can get very spammy for heavy users, and may make instance admins reluctant to enable the feature.

This proposal redesigns the current Beaker usage reminder system, allowing it to be user based.

(See also: #994325)

Beaker usage report emails¶

The existing usage alert email mechanism will be redesigned to send at most one email per user, per day. An alert email will be the sent to users under the following conditions:

• Expiring Reservations
  • they have a recipe running /distribution/reservesys or in “Reserved” status and the associated watchdog timer will expire within 24 hours.
• Reservations for In Demand Systems
  • they have had a system reserved for at least 3 days, at least 1 recipe is waiting for that system.
• Delayed Jobs
  • they have a job which is more than 14 days old but still contains Queued recipes

The given limits would all be server configuration options, with these values as the defaults.

As long as a user triggers one of the alerts, then once a day they would get an email with the subject line:

[Beaker] Usage report for <name> (<date>)

The usage report would contain up to three sections, corresponding to the different alert conditions:

• Expiring Reservations
• Open Loans & Reservations for In Demand Systems
• Delayed Jobs

For expiring reservations, the time of expiration would be given along with the FQDN of the system.

For in demand systems, the duration of the current loan or reservation would be given, the number of recipes currently waiting, and then the FQDN of the system. Loans and reservations will be shown separately.

For purposes of the usage report, waiting recipes would be those that:

• are at least 1 hour old (filtering out transient noise due to new jobs being processed and scheduled)
• would be able to run on this system if it was in Automated mode and neither loaned to this user nor reserved by them.

For delayed jobs, the time since the job was submitted would be given, along with a link to the job details page.

An example report would look like this:

=========
[Beaker] Usage report for <name> (<date>)
=========
Hi <name>,

Your reservations of the following systems in <Beaker instance FQDN> are
going to expire within 24 hours. If you wish to ensure you retain the
contents of these systems, please extend your reservation.

Expiry Date                   FQDN
2014-05-15 05:18:01 +10:00    host.beakerlab.example.com

The following systems have been allocated to you in <Beaker instance FQDN>
for more than <X> days and have other recipes queued for execution.Please
return them if you are no longer using them.

Duration    Waiting     FQDN
7 days      1 recipe    host2.beakerlab.example.com

The following jobs you submitted to <Beaker instance FQDN> have been queued
for more than <X> days. Please cancel them if they are no longer relevant,
or perhaps arrange a loan of an appropriate system or systems

Start time                   Delayed Job
2014-05-15 05:18:01 +10:00   https://<Beaker instance FQDN>/jobs/4594

=========

Deferred features¶

• The usage e-mail covers outstanding reservations, but it does not currently include information about outstanding loans. This is because Beaker does not track the start date of loans apart from in the system history, which cannot be efficiently queried for generating the usage e-mail.
• In future, when Beaker supports loan expiry, the usage e-mails could be updated to include loans expiring soon (in addition to reservations expiring soon).
• In future, it would be possible to build a dashboard page that displays users’ systems and jobs. Then we can use it in the email template to give users an overview of their Beaker usage.