2021-01-13: 500 error when visiting the general projects setting page

Summary

A code bug caused a 500 error on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/edit or any project settings page. Error is only present on the General settings page, is not present in the other setting pages (e.g https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/settings/ci_cd).

The change was reverted - gitlab-org/gitlab!46222 (merged)

Issue initially raised as gitlab-org/gitlab#297666 (closed)

More information will be added as we investigate the issue.

Timeline

All times UTC.

2021-01-13

• 11:20pm @mayra-cabrera opens gitlab-org/gitlab#297666 (closed) to record the error. The change is in an ongoing production deployment.
• 11:27pm Production deployment completes and the error is visible to all users
• 11:35pm @mayra-cabrera creates revert gitlab-org/gitlab!51662 (merged) and picks into the auto_deployment

2021-01-14

• 05:59am The revert is deployed to Staging
• 06:51am The revert is deployed to Canary
• 10:13am The revert is deployed to Production

Corrective Actions

1. Create development seeds for all template types gitlab-org/gitlab#299110
2. Improve Service Desk documentation about templates. gitlab-org/gitlab#299165 (closed)
3. New e2e tests are being added to cover the gaps:
   • gitlab-org/quality/testcases#1229 (closed)
   • gitlab-org/quality/testcases#1230 (closed)
   • gitlab-org/quality/testcases#1231 (closed)
   • gitlab-org/quality/testcases#1232 (closed)
   • gitlab-org/quality/testcases#1235 (closed)

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Incident Review

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Summary

1. Service(s) affected:
2. Team attribution:
3. Time to detection:
4. Minutes downtime or degradation:

Metrics

Customer Impact

1. Who was impacted by this incident? (i.e. external customers, internal customers)
   1. ...
2. What was the customer experience during the incident? (i.e. preventing them from doing X, incorrect display of Y, ...)
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3. How many customers were affected?
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4. If a precise customer impact number is unknown, what is the estimated impact (number and ratio of failed requests, amount of traffic drop, ...)?
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What were the root causes?

"5 Whys"

Incident Response Analysis

1. How was the incident detected?
   1. ...
2. How could detection time be improved?
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3. How was the root cause diagnosed?
   1. ...
4. How could time to diagnosis be improved?
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5. How did we reach the point where we knew how to mitigate the impact?
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6. How could time to mitigation be improved?
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7. What went well?
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Post Incident Analysis

1. Did we have other events in the past with the same root cause?
   1. ...
2. Do we have existing backlog items that would've prevented or greatly reduced the impact of this incident?
   1. ...
3. Was this incident triggered by a change (deployment of code or change to infrastructure)? If yes, link the issue.
   1. ...

Lessons Learned

Guidelines

• Blameless RCA Guideline

Resources

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