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Jupyter runbooks

Companies are beginning to consider using interactive notebooks, such as Jupyter notebooks, for DevOps/SRE work. Instead of a markdown/text runbook, consider a fully interactive runbook with support for pulling in metrics as well as an integrated "command line" tool to take action.

Other companies already have a metrics notebook, such as Azure and DataDog but are any additional integrations.

Consider this prior art: https://www.nurtch.com/

Proposal

We already have, or are working on, many of the potential components:

  • ChatOps
    • Similarly, an interface for executing ChatOps commands outside of Slack. Effectively your CLI, or you can bring your own as well.
  • Metrics integration with Prometheus.
    • We should provide a simple tool to explore the integrated Prometheus data from Jupyter notebooks.
    • This could route through GitLab to provide k8s proxy capabilities, so the notebook doesn't have to have direct access to the Prometheus server.
  • Tracing, Logs
    • We should also incorporate the ability to pull in tracing and logging data, similarly to Metrics
  • Merge Request/Issues/Commits
    • It would be nice to clearly refer to problematic commits, diffs in MR's, etc.

With the integration of Notebooks into GitLab, this could be an extremely powerful interactive tool.