GitLab Dedicated - Automate contacting all tenants

Request for comments

Need

Sometimes other teams ask support to reach out to GitLab Dedicated customers. This can happen for single customers or for all of them. With the growing number of tenants in GitLab Dedicated, when we're asked to reach out to all of them, it takes a considerable amount of time to copy/paste the data from Switchboard and create a ticket for each customer. I did this last week while GDCMOCing, and it was clear to me that at some point this will become unsustainable.

We need a way to automate this process, make it less error-prone and more efficient (faster).

Approach

My first idea was to extract information from Switchboard (maybe there's an API?) for all tenants, create a ticket for each tenant with a configured Title and Description. I'm not even sure if this is possible, this is just me throwing wild ideas out there 😅.

Benefit

The benefit here is that the process becomes less error-prone, faster and sustainable. One downside is that we can have multiple tickets that need assignees or a DRI.

Competition / Alternatives

The alternative would be to use the marketing tools to send bulk messages to users or a similar process.

Let me ping some a few relevant folks here:

• @erikamiklos (of course 😊 ): Let me know if you have any ideas that can help solve this problem?
• @ahergenhan @bcarranza (the GitLab Dedicated folks ⭐ ):
  • What's your opinion on this?
  • Have you experienced the same?
  • Do you think there are other solutions or workarounds we can use?
• @gitlab-com/support/support-ops (the ZD kings 👑 ): Is it even possible to gather data from Switchboard and create a ticket for each tenant automatically?
• CC'ing: @cleveland @s_shaik