GitLab

GitLab is a Git-based platform for version control and small-to-large scale project collaboration. GitLab also provides continuous integration and continuous deployment for code and applications.

Observe helps you monitor the GitLab activity of your organizations with these features:

  • Datasets containing details about commits, merge requests, and issues to understand the state of code changes.

  • Additional datasets for jobs, runners, and pipelines to investigate emergent issues.

  • Organizational data about projects, groups, users, and security and admin settings.

  • Dashboards for quickly checking the state of your organization.

  • The ability to tightly control permissions around the data included in your logs.

List of GitLab datasets generated in Observe.

Figure 1 - Datasets included in the Observe GitLab app

Viewing GitLab data in Observe

Activity

The GitLab Activity dashboard provides a high-level overview of your organization’s output, with information on the following activities:

  • Commits by project and author

  • Merge request status

  • Queued, running, and completed jobs

  • Runner status

Activity dashboard for GitLab. Includes information about groups, projects, commits, and authors. Also jobs, runners, and pipelines by status.

Figure 2 - GitLab Activity Dashboard

Use the Activity dashboard to help troubleshoot build problems and view activity over time. Use it to answer questions such as:

  • Which jobs are failing or unresponsive?

  • Were there any relevant commits around the time of an emergent issue?

  • Were there merge requests merged during a specific time frame?

  • Are runners or their jobs having issues?

Administration

Get an overview of your organizations for administrative and security purposes, with insights about these parameters:

  • Groups

  • Projects

  • Issues

  • Members

Administration dashboard for GitLab.

Figure 3 - GitLab Administration dashboard

The Administration dashboard displays an overview of members, projects, groups/subgroups in your organizations, recently updated project information, and created, updated, or closed issues.

Setup

The GitLab app ingests data using webhooks and the Observe API poller. To install and configure data collection, see the GitLab Installation Guide.

After configuration, data from GitLab populates the datasets and boards and displays information about your organizations.

GitLab App v0.4.0 Ingest Upgrade

With the release of version 0.4.0 of the GitLab app, changes have been made to the poller and webhook ingest methods that require any existing pollers be removed and recreated.

For more information, please see the GitLab Ingest Upgrade Guide.