[Spike] Investigate options for daily SaaS usage data
Background
Today, the Service Ping service collects weekly license usage data for Self-Managed instances. It also collects aggregated data for all of GitLab.com on a weekly basis.
Since more granular instance-level data is needed for SaaS, the Product Intelligence team currently has a manual process (example) run regularly to collect this data. It is manual given the original process was determined to be too time-consuming and expensive. To replace this manual effort, there is an ongoing effort with the data team to automate a weekly "service ping-like" collection of this data.
In 2021, the fulfillment team implemented License Sync for Self-Managed instances, which provides daily license usage data. This has been a huge improvement for our internal teams.
This Slack thread contains some relevant discussion.
Ask
Investigate options for daily collection of instance-level license usage data for SaaS instances. This would need to involve storing of data in a table for each day, in order to track historical changes and trends.
This could be owned by Fulfillment, similar to seat link
is today for Self-Managed.
Options to consider:
- Could the data team's process be daily instead of weekly?
- Could we use a similar process as is used by QSR for SaaS today?
- Could we create the SaaS usage data as
seat link
records?