Global Support Pods Pilot

After running the APAC Support Pods pilot for a month, we are now ready to pilot Support Pods globally. This issue is created to describe the what, why, how and other details.

Please read through the Support Pods (F.K.A. Areas of Focus) epic and the APAC pilot issue for more context on Support Pods.

Participants

Timeline

  • Global Pilot starts from second week of September.
  • Pilot with these 8 Support Engineers is planned to be run through at least September and October.
    • We will include more engineers at any point during the pilot if we believe that it would be useful.
  • Global rollout timeline (post pilot) is TBD (based on lessons learned from pilot).

Support Pods in the Pilot

  1. CI/CD
  2. Instance Management
  3. Configuring Authentication and Authorization
  4. GitLab Features

To see the problem types that map to specific support pods, take a look at this work group doc section: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TLub48gTRd1qD6BaqnFObY0FhwcCeQ7xU6k68XbLHoc/edit#heading=h.26vqt971g6i8

  • We recommend having a support engineer sign up for no more than 2 pods, at least during the pilot. One of the decisions we will make during the pilot is determining the sweet spot with the number of pods and/or efficiency with tooling if there are more than 1 pods.

Support Engineers and Support Pods Mapping

Support Engineer CI/CD Instance Management Authentication/Authorization GitLab Features
@s_shaik (APAC) ✅ ✅
@hchouraria (APAC) ✅ ✅
@awinata (APAC) ✅ ✅
@anton (APAC) ✅ ✅
@greg (AMER) ✅ ✅
@cleveland (AMER) ✅ ✅
@duncan_harris (AMER) ✅ ✅
@katrinleinweber (EMEA) ✅ ✅
@asmaa.hassan (EMEA) ✅ ✅

Guidelines for working with the Support Pods

See the Support Pods workflow page for the current approach to workflow for the pilot.

General Guidelines

  1. Prioritizing between multiple pods in the current views: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/workflows/working-with-pods.html#can-i-sign-up-to-more-than-1-pod
  2. When contributing on a ticket from the pod views, please use the macro General::Tag support pod contribution tickets - this will add the spt_pod tag to the ticket, as well as a private note. We will be using this for better reporting on the initiative.

References

Edited by Katrin Leinweber