Add a new column to customer usage reports for billable seats in use
Problem
When the L&R team is working with a self-managed customer to determine why a license file or an activation code may be failing, we will look at their Service Ping data for their current active license on the version.gitlab.com site on the customer's Hosts page. On that page, there are key details about the customer's seat usage that we observe. There are the Active User Count, Historical Max Users Count, and Licensed User Count fields presented. The issue encountered is the Active User Count value tends to list ALL active users, which looks to include bots, and guest users on an Ultimate license, and any other seats that are not charged to the customer as a billable seat. This obscures from support what their actual billable seat counts are, which can prolong the troubleshooting process. If the customer has renewed their license, we can easily tell if they went over their Licensed User Count by comparing it to their Historical Max Users Count which the system does for us as well. We do not have a clear and direct insight into their Billable Seat count in use at the time of the Service Ping. This obscures for support how their renewal compares to their reported billable seat count at the time of the last ping or historically.
Proposal
My proposal would be to add another field to the Hosts page labeled Billable User Count. This information is reported to GitLab already for QSR purposes. My proposal would be to make it clear and available to support.
Result
The result would be less correspondence between the customer and GitLab support and asking for screenshots, so we can determine their current billable seat count if it is available already. Even if the data is out of date by a few days, it would speed the resolution process for customers when dealing with tickets of that nature.