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This project is an incubation project being run inside the Green Software Foundation; as such, we DON’T recommend using it in any critical use case. Incubation projects are experimental, offer no support guarantee, have minimal governance and process, and may be retired at any moment. This project may one day Graduate, in which case this disclaimer will be removed.

Regroup

Regroup is an IF feature that reorganizes a tree according to keys provided by the user. This allows users to regroup their observations according to various properties of their application. For example, the following manifest file contains a flat array of observations. This is how you might expect data to arrive from an importer plugin, maybe one that hits a metrics API for a cloud service.

name: if-demo
description: demo pipeline
tree:
  children:
    my-app:
      pipeline:
        observe:
        regroup:
          - cloud-region
          - instance-type     
        compute:
          - teads-curve
      inputs:
        - timestamp: 2023-07-06T00:00
          duration: 300 
          instance-type: A1 
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 99
        - timestamp: 2023-07-06T05:00 
          duration: 300 
          instance-type: A1 
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 23    
        - timestamp: 2023-07-06T10:00
          duration: 300
          instance-type: A1 
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 12
        - timestamp: 2023-07-06T00:00 # note this time restarts at the start timstamp
          duration: 300 
          instance-type: B1
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 11
        - timestamp: 2023-07-06T05:00 
          duration: 300 
          instance-type: B1
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 67
        - timestamp: 2023-07-06T10:00
          duration: 300 
          instance-type: B1
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 1

However, each observation contains an instance-type field that varies between observations. There are two instance types being represented in this array of observations. This means there are duplicate entries for the same timestamp in this array. This is the problem that regroup solves. You provide instance-type as a key in the regroup config and it extracts the data belonging to the different instances and separates them into independent arrays. The above example would be restructured so that instance types A1 and B1 have their own data, as follows:

children:
  A1:
      inputs:
      - timestamp: 2023-07-06T00:00
          duration: 300
          instance-type: A1
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 99
      - timestamp: 2023-07-06T05:00
          duration: 300
          instance-type: A1
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 23
      - timestamp: 2023-07-06T10:00
          duration: 300
          instance-type: A1
          region: uk-west
          cpu-util: 12
  B1:
      inputs:
      - timestamp: 2023-07-06T00:00
          duration: 300
          instance-type: B1
          region: uk-east
          cpu-util: 11
      - timestamp: 2023-07-06T05:00
          duration: 300
          instance-type: B1
          region: uk-east
          cpu-util: 67
      - timestamp: 2023-07-06T10:00
          duration: 300
          instance-type: B1
          region: uk-east
          cpu-util: 1

Using regroup​

To use regroup, you simply provide the keys you want to regroup by in the regroup pipeline. regroup is NOT a plugin, it is a core feature of IF that is executed when you run if-run or if-run --regroup if the config is available in the manifest file.

The config is provided at the node level, and it looks as follows:

tree:
  children:
    my-app:
      pipeline:
        observe:
        regroup:
          - cloud-region
          - instance-type

In the example above, the plugin would regroup the input data for the specific component by cloud-region and by instance-type.