Distinguish between manually triggered CI runs and runs on main

[msimberg]

As far as I know, there's currently no way to distinguish in the reframe elastic data stream whether the test data was sent from a CI run manually triggered on a PR or if it was sent from a regular daily/nightly run on the main branch.

Do you think it would be possible to distinguish between these cases somehow? Is it possible to attach additional metadata to the data that reframe sends?

[ekouts]

Hm, do you know if there is an env var or something that we could use to know how the pipeline was triggered? If yes, then we can add extra metadata in the configuration: https://github.com/eth-cscs/cscs-reframe-tests/blob/main/config/common.py#L69

Otherwise I think we would need to setup a different pipeline that is triggerred by the manual triggers. Not sure if it makes sense to send elastic data to elastic from PRs.

[msimberg]

Not sure if it makes sense to send elastic data to elastic from PRs.

That's a good point. Not pushing from PR pipelines might be simplest. I know there's at least a CI_COMMIT_BRANCH environment variable that could be used to filter on main, or just added to the extra metadata (or both?).

@finkandreas IIUC there's no way on the GitLab side (at least currently) to recognize what triggered a pipeline (directly; i.e. without trying reconstruct the logic from e.g. branch names or using the GitHub API), right?