Add native performance metrics for GitHub Actions (e.g., average job duration, percentiles, trends)

[camilamaia]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Metrics & Insights

Discussion Details

Hello,

I would like to suggest improvements to the observability and performance insights available for workflows and jobs. Currently, while individual job durations are visible in each workflow run, there is no built-in way to access aggregated performance metrics such as:

• Average job duration (avg job time)
• Median and percentiles (p50, p95)
• Trends over time (e.g., identifying performance regressions or improvements)
• Aggregation by workflow, job, or branch

The existing "Actions Usage Metrics" section provides useful insights into billing and total usage, but it is primarily focused on consumption (e.g., total minutes used) rather than performance. It does not provide the level of detail needed to understand CI efficiency or identify bottlenecks.

Use case:
As a maintainer, I want to understand how long my workflows and jobs take on average and how this evolves over time, so I can optimize CI performance and improve developer experience.

Suggested solution:

• Provide aggregated performance metrics directly in the GitHub Actions UI
• Allow filtering by workflow, job, branch, and time range
• Include percentiles (p50, p95) and trend visualizations
• Expose these metrics via API for external integrations

Today, achieving this requires building custom tooling on top of the API or relying on third-party integrations, which adds unnecessary complexity.

Having these insights available natively would significantly improve CI observability and help maintainers and teams better manage performance.

Thank you for considering this feature!

[github-actions[bot]]

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[syedsafeer]

This is a much-needed suggestion. Currently, the "Actions Usage Metrics" are almost entirely focused on billing and consumption, which doesn't help at all when trying to identify bottlenecks or optimize CI performance.

Until GitHub adds this natively, the only real workarounds are:

1. GitHub API: Pulling run data via /repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs and calculating your own medians/percentiles using a script.
2. Third-party Tooling: Using open-source exporters (like the Prometheus GitHub exporter) to pipe data into Grafana for proper trend visualization.
   Having these metrics natively in the UI would save teams a lot of time building custom observability tools. I really hope the GitHub team considers this!

(If this clarifies the current situation and workarounds, please Mark as Answer.)