Subscribe to alert for a particular pipeline (and maybe job)

Problem to solve

  1. When you are developing, it can be handy to get an alert when a particular pipeline you care about finishes. You don't want to subscribe to all of them, and it isn't necessarily even a pipeline you started, but you are going to do something when it finishes (test, start up another process, and so on).

  2. If I'm product person who waits for a certain GitLab pipeline to succeed so I can know a certain feature was deployed to a validation environment by the pipeline, I want to subscribe/watch that pipe and get notified once its ready, so I can start using the validation envrionment --> from #352103 (comment 834517767)

Intended users

Primarily developers

User experience goal

Prevent having to come back and refresh the pipeline page since you know you'll be alerted when it is time.

Proposal

Add an "alert me when this pipeline finishes" button that will create a notification per the users preferences (so could be email, tab notification, and or todo) when the pipeline no longer has any active jobs running. "finished" could be canceled, failed or succeeds.

Allow anyone to click a "Watch/Subscribe" button for any running pipeline to get notified about its completion status. This button could be an opt-in button to allow watching pipelines you are not already "watching".

Further details

From https://twitter.com/aChrisSmith/status/1260699928088604672?s=19

Permissions and Security

Ability to subscribe to a pipeline status should probably match up with who can view the pipeline page itself. So if Guests can't see the pipeline they can't watch it, if you can see it you can watch it.

Documentation

This will need a quick blurb in the docs about the pipeline page describing what it does and how a user gets notified.

Availability & Testing

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

  • Users utilizing the feature, should we track how many users choose this option in a month?

What is the type of buyer?

Is this a cross-stage feature?

Links / references

Insight: https://dovetailapp.com/projects/4a4421a9-9fb4-4e16-acab-9ba9042e741d/insights/present/2b679894-0792-491a-bd46-6d31ccf3ef81

Edited by Veethika Mishra