ote (otel-explorer)
See where your CI/CD time actually goes.

Install · Quick Start · Features · Trends · OpenTelemetry

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An interactive terminal tool that turns OpenTelemetry traces and CI/CD runs into navigable timelines — so you can find the slow jobs, the flaky tests, and the queue-time bottlenecks. Works with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildkite, Dagger, and any system that emits OTel traces.

Install

brew install stefanpenner/tap/ote

Or install the latest binary with curl (macOS and Linux):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stefanpenner/otel-explorer/main/install.sh | sh

Or with Go:

go install github.com/stefanpenner/otel-explorer/cmd/ote@latest

Quick Start

Point it at any PR or commit:

ote nodejs/node/pull/60369

That's it. If you have GitHub CLI installed and authenticated, the token is picked up automatically. Otherwise:

export GITHUB_TOKEN="your_token_here"

Features

Interactive TUI

The default view is a full-screen terminal UI with a tree of workflows, jobs, and steps on the left and a Gantt-style timeline on the right. Navigate with arrow keys or vim bindings, expand/collapse nodes, multi-select ranges, search, and drill into details.

Perfetto Export

Export any analysis as a Perfetto trace for deep-dive visualization with full zoom, search, and flame-chart views:

ote <url> --perfetto=trace.pftrace --open-in-perfetto

Trace Backend Integration

Pull traces directly from Grafana Tempo or Jaeger:

ote --tempo=http://localhost:3200 --trace-id=abc123
ote --jaeger=http://localhost:16686 --trace-id=abc123

Webhook Input

Pipe a GitHub Actions webhook payload to analyze the associated commit — useful for event-driven analysis:

echo '{"workflow_run":{"head_sha":"abc123"},"repository":{"full_name":"owner/repo"}}' \
  | ote --otel

Enrichment

Beyond raw timings, the analyzer enriches spans with:

• Queue time — how long jobs waited for a runner
• Runner distribution — which runners ran which jobs
• Billable minutes — computed cost breakdown
• Retry detection — identifies re-run jobs and counts attempts
• PR annotations — review approvals, comments, merge events shown as markers on the timeline
• CI/CD pipeline recognition — auto-classifies spans using OTel CI/CD semantic conventions (cicd.pipeline.* attributes)

Trends

Analyze workflow performance over time to spot regressions, flaky jobs, and slow-downs:

ote trends owner/repo                          # last 30 days
ote trends owner/repo --days=7 --branch=main   # scoped
ote trends owner/repo --format=json             # machine-readable

================================================================================
  Historical Trend Analysis: stefanpenner/otel-explorer
================================================================================

Summary Statistics
------------------
Average Duration                        1m 46s
Median Duration                         1m 41s
95th Percentile                         3m 13s
Average Success Rate                     61.7%
Trend Direction           Improving (-20.7%)
Flaky Jobs Detected                          1

Trend analysis covers success rates, duration percentiles, per-job breakdowns, flaky detection (>10% failure rate), and trend direction. For large repos, it uses stratified temporal sampling to keep API usage reasonable — run-level metrics are always exact, job-level analysis is sampled at 95% confidence / ±10% margin by default.

ote trends owner/repo --no-sample               # exact, more API calls
ote trends owner/repo --confidence=0.99 --margin=0.05  # tune sampling

OpenTelemetry

Export analysis data as OpenTelemetry spans — feed them into any observability stack:

# JSON spans to stdout
ote <url> --otel

# OTLP/HTTP
ote <url> --otel=localhost:4318

# OTLP/gRPC
ote <url> --otel-grpc=localhost:4317

You can also ingest OTel trace files from any CI/CD system — Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildkite, Dagger, and anything else that emits traces following the OTel CI/CD semantic conventions:

ote --trace=spans.json

Development

Built with Bazel for hermetic, reproducible builds.

bazel run //:ote -- <url>             # run
bazel build //...                     # build all
bazel test //...                      # test all
bazel run //:gazelle                  # regenerate BUILD files

License

MIT