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[SDCI-2079] Document automatic job retries (Preview) - hybrid approach#36147

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[SDCI-2079] Document automatic job retries (Preview) - hybrid approach#36147
afontan wants to merge 4 commits intomasterfrom
alejandro.fontan/SDCI-2079-auto-retries-hybrid

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@afontan afontan commented Apr 20, 2026

What does this PR do? What is the motivation?

Fixes SDCI-2079

Adds customer-facing documentation for the automatic job retries feature on GitHub Actions and GitLab. The feature is in Preview.

Approach A — Hybrid (dedicated page + compat-table rows on each provider). This is one of three variant PRs opened to compare documentation structures.

Changes:

  • New page: content/en/continuous_integration/pipelines/automatic_retries.md — single source of truth with provider tabs.
  • github.md and gitlab.md — new row in the Compatibility table linking to the dedicated page.
  • pipelines/_index.md — new row in the Supported features matrix.

Other approaches in review:

  • Approach B — inline sections on each provider page.
  • Approach C — dedicated page only, no per-provider references.

Merge instructions

Merge readiness:

  • Ready for merge

Additional notes

Tone is Preview / private beta; access is gated via Datadog account team. Internal implementation details (enrichment tags, SCI internals, WFA, reducers) are intentionally excluded.

Adds customer-facing documentation for the automatic job retries
feature on GitHub Actions and GitLab. Uses a dedicated
automatic_retries.md page as the source of truth, surfaced through
the compatibility tables on each provider page and the supported
features matrix on the pipelines index.
- Replace "hiccups" colloquialism with "failures".
- Split long em-dashed sentence in Overview into two sentences.
- Replace passive "the retry outcome is reflected" with active.
- Replace "configurable maximum" with "maximum number of attempts" since
  the limit is not customer-tunable today.
- Replace "when the failure is determined retriable" with "when the failure
  is identified as retriable".
- Replace quoted "rerun failed jobs" with plain prose (GitHub API call).
- Replace awkward "compute minutes consumed by your pipelines" with
  "GitHub Actions compute usage".
- Add missing "as" in "aren't classified retriable" (GitLab tab).
- Make GitLab provider list items structurally consistent (all full
  sentences).
- Rename "Provider support" heading to "Provider-specific behavior" for
  stronger AI retrieval.
- Add GitHub Actions and GitLab setup pages to further_reading.
- Replace em dash with period in access-gating sentence.
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afontan commented Apr 21, 2026

Editorial review (post-fix round)

No build-breakers. One must-fix plus a few polish suggestions.

Higher-level

  • Requirements list — inconsistent item structure + banner redundancy. Bullets 1-2 are noun-phrase fragments; bullet 3 tacks on two supporting sentences about Preview access that duplicate the top banner.
  • "Preview." cell prefix still worth aligning with team convention — no other row in the supported-features matrix or compatibility tables uses a status prefix.

Must fix

content/en/continuous_integration/pipelines/automatic_retries.md — Requirements list inconsistent + redundant with banner

- CI Visibility enabled for your [GitHub Actions][1] or [GitLab][2] integration.
- [Datadog Source Code Integration][3] configured for the repositories where you want automatic retries.
- Automatic job retries enabled for your organization (see banner above for how to request access).

Suggestions

automatic_retries.md — "Genuine code defects are left alone." is idiomatic. Prefer Genuine code defects are not retried.

automatic_retries.md — "This reduces the number of pipelines developers manually re-run..." — "This" across a paragraph boundary and the clause "the number of pipelines developers manually re-run" is awkward. Prefer:

Automatic retries reduce the number of pipelines that developers re-run by hand, shorten feedback loops, and keep pipeline success metrics focused on non-transient failures.

automatic_retries.md (GitLab tab) — "as soon as the job finishes failing" reads oddly. Prefer as soon as the job fails.

automatic_retries.md (GitLab tab) — Slight preposition redundancy. Either reading is grammatical:

Smart retries work with GitLab.com (SaaS) and self-hosted GitLab instances reachable by the Datadog Source Code Integration.

automatic_retries.md — Structural AI-readability (optional). ## How it works## How automatic job retries work for stronger retrieval. Non-blocking — siblings also use "How it works".

Link verification

  • [1]: /continuous_integration/pipelines/github/ — ✓
  • [2]: /continuous_integration/pipelines/gitlab/ — ✓
  • [3]: /integrations/guide/source-code-integration/ — ✓
  • Matrix-row "More info" link — resolves on merge.

Verdict

Comment — one must-fix (Requirements list), rest are polish. The previous round of fixes addressed the bigger issues well.

afontan added 2 commits April 21, 2026 11:03
- Collapse Requirements bullet 3 into a single fragment; redirect readers
  to the banner instead of repeating access-request instructions.
- Replace "Genuine code defects are left alone" with "not retried" to
  avoid the idiom.
- Replace ambiguous "This reduces the number of pipelines developers
  manually re-run" with "Automatic retries reduce the number of pipelines
  that developers re-run by hand".
- GitLab tab: replace awkward "as soon as the job finishes failing" with
  "as soon as the job fails", and drop the redundant second "with" in the
  Smart retries bullet.
Automatic retries use the same AI error classifier as CI jobs failure
analysis, which reads indexed CI job logs to decide whether a failure is
transient. Adds the log collection dependency to the Requirements list
with provider-specific setup links, plus a cross-reference to the
failure analysis guide.
@afontan afontan marked this pull request as ready for review April 21, 2026 14:18
@afontan afontan requested review from a team as code owners April 21, 2026 14:18
@afontan afontan requested a review from xinyeji April 21, 2026 14:18
@hestonhoffman hestonhoffman added the editorial review Waiting on a more in-depth review label Apr 21, 2026
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