Manage tasks and sequences

A Keptn project’s shipyard defines sequences that execute tasks. When the task receives the action.finished event, the task is finished and subsequent tasks can execute.

Stop a task

Keptn does not provide a facility to actually abort a task. The keptn abort command causes the shipyard controller to stop processing, meaning it does not continue processing and so prevents the next task from being triggered, but it does not actually abort the task.

An executing task is stopped only when it receives an action.finished event, usually with a data.result value so that the shipyard controller knows what to do next.. So, if you need to stop a task, you can send a “fake” action.finished event using the Keptn API. You can do this from the Keptn Bridge:

Click the PC icon in the action task that is currently spinning and copy the event content.
Navigate to the API page and click on the user icon on the top-right
Click on the Keptn API link.
- Open the POST /event api and click on “try it out”.
- Paste the event body that you copied before. Here,
- Set (or add if missing) the value of data.status to errored and the value of data.result to fail.
- Change the value of type to have the finished suffix instead of started.
Authenticate the API via the API token as discussed in Access the API and you can fire it.

This sends a finished event for your action, marking the task as failed.

Identifying and cancelling a blocked sequence

Sequences that use the same service within the same stage can not be run in parallel. If a sequence is stalling, e.g. due to a task executor not being able to fully process its task, other sequences for the same stage/service will not be able to be dispatched until the stalling sequence is cancelled. To identify the keptnContext ID of a stalling sequence in Keptn 0.18.0 and later, use the new GET api/controlPlane/v1/sequence-execution endpoint. For this partcular scenario, the following query parameters will need to be set:

project: This is a mandatory query parameter that always needs to be set for this endpoint
stage: The stage which is currently blocked by a stalling sequence
service: The service that is currently blocked by a stalling sequence
status: This needs to be set to started. Since at any given point in time, there may be only one sequence execution with the started for a given service within the given stage, this filter will give us the blocking sequence.

The resulting query looks as follows:

curl -X 'GET' \
  'http://<api-url>/api/controlPlane/v1/sequence-execution?project=<project>&stage=<stage>&service=<service>&status=started' \
  -H 'accept: application/json'

The response will be a JSON object in the following format:

{
   "nextPageKey":1,
   "pageSize":1,
   "totalCount":87,
   "sequenceExecutions":[
      {
         "_id":"99242617-7992-4440-8c4c-2c4aad8c1bc6",
         "schemaVersion":"1",
         "scope":{
            "project":"myapp",
            "stage":"staging",
            "service":"some-service",
            "status":"succeeded",
            "result":"pass",
            "keptnContext":"f7bdf6d6-8257-41fa-80e8-b86609f78d83",
            "triggeredId":"cfa815ad-b5f8-4715-82de-c375f52bc764",
            "gitcommitid":"1c2c7f6d232277061f623b47c2cbd65ce7c091b5",
            "eventType":"sh.keptn.event.staging.delivery.triggered"
         },
         "sequence":{
            "name":"delivery",
            "tasks":[
               {
                  "name":"deployment",
                  "properties":{
                     "deploymentstrategy":"blue_green_service"
                  }
               },
               {
                  "name":"test",
                  "properties":{
                     "teststrategy":"performance"
                  }
               },
               {
                  "name":"evaluation",
                  "properties":null
               },
               {
                  "name":"release",
                  "properties":null
               }
            ]
         },
         "status":{
            "state":"started",
            "stateBeforePause":"",
            "previousTasks":[
               {
                  "name":"deployment",
                  "triggeredID":"c6108a73-7459-42fe-8d10-a22b2fea9268",
                  "result":"pass",
                  "status":"succeeded",
                  "properties":{
                     "deployment":{
                        "deploymentNames":[
                           "canary"
                        ],
                        "deploymentURIsLocal":[
                           "http://some-service.myapp-staging:80"
                        ],
                        "deploymentURIsPublic":[
                           "http://some-service.myapp-staging.svc.cluster.local:80"
                        ],
                        "deploymentstrategy":"duplicate"
                     },
                     "message":"Successfully deployed",
                     "project":"myapp",
                     "result":"pass",
                     "service":"some-service",
                     "stage":"staging",
                     "status":"succeeded"
                  }
               }
            ],
            "currentTask":{
               "name":"test",
               "triggeredID":"f28aa212-7ef2-47a5-8a54-dff620a588ec",
               "events":[
                  {
                     "eventType":"sh.keptn.event.test.started",
                     "source":"jmeter-service",
                     "result":"pass",
                     "status":"succeeded",
                     "time":"2022-08-02T08:12:37.957Z",
                     "properties":null
                  }
               ]
            }
         },
         "inputProperties":{
            "configurationChange":{
               "values":{
                  "image":"docker.io/keptnexamples/some-service:1.3.0"
               }
            },
            "deployment":{
               "deploymentNames":[
                  "direct"
               ],
               "deploymentURIsLocal":[
                  "http://some-service.myapp-dev:80"
               ],
               "deploymentURIsPublic":[
                  "http://some-service.myapp-dev.svc.cluster.local:80"
               ],
               "deploymentstrategy":"direct"
            },
            "evaluation":{
               "indicatorResults":null,
               "result":"pass",
               "score":0,
               "sloFileContent":"",
               "timeEnd":"2022-08-02T08:11:18.633Z",
               "timeStart":"2022-08-02T08:11:15.145Z"
            },
            "message":"",
            "project":"myapp",
            "result":"pass",
            "service":"some-service",
            "stage":"staging",
            "status":"succeeded",
            "temporaryData":{
               "distributor":{
                  "subscriptionID":""
               }
            },
            "test":{
               "end":"2022-08-02T08:11:18.633Z",
               "start":"2022-08-02T08:11:15.145Z"
            }
         },
         "triggeredAt":"2022-08-02T08:11:19.855Z"
      }
   ]
}

The Keptn context ID of the sequence can be found in the scope.keptnContext property - in this case its value is f7bdf6d6-8257-41fa-80e8-b86609f78d83. Using this context ID, you can either navigate to that sequence in the bridge, using the following deep link format: http://<keptn-url>/bridge/project/<myapp>/sequence/<keptn-context-id>, and cancel it from there, or you can cancel the sequence using the api/controlPlane/v1/sequence/<project>/<keptn-context-id> endpoint:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://<api-url>/api/controlPlane/v1/sequence/<project>/<keptn-context-id>/control' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "state": "abort"
}'