Alert Integrations

Overview

We are considering creating specific integrations for the most popular monitoring tools in addition to the generic REST endpoint. The benefits of this include:

  • Reduces time for users to integrate and then see value
  • Reduces risk of users integrating incorrectly resulting in bad data (bad data in = bad data out)
  • Could be a great marketing opportunity for GitLab (e.g. We now integrate with New Relic)

The cons of this are the Health team is small (10 people). Creating and maintaining these integrations over time will be an exponentially increasing amount of work.

Supporting research

In March 2018, the UX Research team prepared the DevOps Insights report. See page 5 for discussions on Monitoring. Based on a survey with X responses, we gathered the following intel on monitoring tools used in market:

Screen_Shot_2020-04-10_at_9.11.58_AM

We may choose to run this survey again to get an up-to-date view of the observability market and tools in use.

Proposal

Generate list of tools we plan to integrate with using the following criteria:

  • What is used in the GitLab universe
  • What tools do not allow for custom payloads
  • What are open source
  • What provide a free tier

Questions for discussion

  • What tools do we start with?
  • Will these be hard to maintain?

Designs

As part of this issue, we've discussed adding in additional integrations options, including consolidating the existing Prometheus endpoints so that all alert endpoint configuration happens on the same alert endpoint page. When we get to the point of doing this, we can introduce a dropdown to the alert endpoint page where users can select which tool they are configuring an endpoint for. Here's how that could look:

Untitled

Changing the dropdown selection would update the URL to be specific to the tool being selected:

grafana

When there is only one tool (generic), we discussed adding in a "teaser" letting users know more tools are coming. You can see the text below the dropdown field. The link could send users directly to this epic, where they could view the latest integrations discussions. Alternately, the dropdown could just be suppressed until additional integration options are available.

Edited by Amelia Bauerly