When you have complex builds pipelines, it is useful to be able to see the progress of each stage. To that end, Jenkins Enterprise includes an extended visualization of workflow build history on the index page of a flow project, under Stage View. (You can also click on Full Stage View to get a full-screen view.)

To take advantage of this view, you need to define stages in your flow. You can have as many stages as you like, in a linear sequence. (They may be inside other steps such as node if that is convenient.) Give each a short name that will appear in the GUI.

stage 'Checkout'
node {
  svn 'https://svn.mycorp/trunk/'
  stage 'Build'
  sh 'make all'
  stage 'Test'
  sh 'make test'
}

When you run some builds, the stage view will appear with Checkout, Build, and Test columns, and one row per build. When hovering over a stage cell you can click the Logs button to see log messages printed in that stage: after the preceding stage step and before the next one.

Other important events are also indicated with special buttons, either in a stage cell or for the build as a whole. If a build is waiting in an input step, you will be able to tell it to proceed (or not). Download can be used to obtain any artifacts archived by a build. Retry can restart from a checkpoint if one was recorded.

Each row also records the build number, date it was started, and any changelog entries from a version control system. Progress bars also indicate how long each stage is taking and how long it might still be expected to take, based on historical averages.