Summary

Two compounding fixes for the flake observed on PR #812's merge_group run where test_oserror_retries and test_retry_max_count_not_exceeded failed with assert mock_validate_conn.call_count == 6 — unexpected /telemetry-ext requests were counted alongside the intended session-endpoint retries, inflating the count.

Why it was happening

Two interacting causes:

1. _isolated_from_telemetry() only patches TelemetryClientFactory.initialize_telemetry_client. That covers new connections created during the test, but not real TelemetryClient instances that slip in via:

   • Stale module-global state from a previous test.
   • Code paths that bypass initialize_telemetry_client (e.g. connection_failure_log already passes through the patch, but other paths might not in the future).
   • Pre-existing clients created before the context manager entered.

2. The merge queue ran multiple entries in parallel against the same warehouse. The previous concurrency group was keyed on github.ref (per-PR in queue: gh-readonly-queue/main/pr-N-…), so PR ci(code-coverage): move push:main trigger to merge_group #810's and PR test(telemetry/e2e): make TestTelemetryE2E deterministic + deflake retry tests under merge-queue load #812's queue entries ran concurrently. The warehouse was fine for individual queue entries but couldn't handle two simultaneous loads — telemetry/retry paths started intermittently failing on /telemetry-ext, and those failures got counted by mock_validate_conn.

What this PR changes

1. tests/e2e/common/retry_test_mixins.py

Strengthens _isolated_from_telemetry() with two backstop patches:

• TelemetryClient._send_telemetry → no-op
• TelemetryClient._export_event → no-op

These cover any path that could reach the telemetry HTTP layer, regardless of how the TelemetryClient instance was created. Layer 1 (factory swap) catches the common case; layers 2 and 3 catch edge cases.

The existing @patch("...TelemetryClient._send_telemetry") decorators on individual tests stay in place. They're now redundant with the context manager's layer-2 patch, but removing them would expand the diff for no functional benefit.

Local verification: test_oserror_retries runs 5/5 green in a row (previously: flaky on CI, deterministic locally because no warehouse contention).

2. .github/workflows/code-coverage.yml

Serialises merge_group runs under a single fixed concurrency group (e2e-mq-serial). Only one queue entry runs the suite at a time; subsequent entries queue up behind it. pull_request runs keep their per-ref + cancel-in-progress behaviour for fast author feedback.

Trade-off: queue throughput drops to one ~17-min run at a time. Acceptable for this repo's PR volume. The alternative is the flake we've been chasing.

What's NOT in this PR

test_retry_max_count_not_exceeded still fails on this branch — but it also fails on baseline main, with 'SimpleHttpResponse' object has no attribute 'version_string'. That's an unrelated pre-existing issue (looks like an urllib3 version drift or mocked_server_response mock breakage). Worth tracking separately; out of scope here.

Test plan

• CI passes on this PR (the queue-serialisation kicks in once this lands; until then PR-event runs use the existing pattern).
• PR test(telemetry/e2e): make TestTelemetryE2E deterministic + deflake retry tests under merge-queue load #812 (telemetry deflake) re-queues and merges cleanly.
• Future merge_group runs show no test_oserror_retries flakes under concurrent queue load.

This pull request and its description were written by Isaac.