Add gitlab.com dashboards to self monitoring project
Problem to solve
In order to make the self-monitoring project more useful to customers, it would be good to add more out-of-the-box dashboards. Since effort is already expended in maintaining the dashboards that are used for gitlab.com, should we add those dashboards to the self monitoring project?
This issue is for discussing if this is a direction we want to take, and if yes, how we can achieve this.
Intended users
User experience goal
The user can have a variety of dashboards available out-of-the-box in the self-monitoring project.
Proposal
If we just add these dashboards to the repository of the self monitoring dashboard, it will be difficult to update them since users can modify dashboards in their project's repository.
We could add these projects as a kind of predefined/system dashboard, so that users cannot modify the original dashboard, but can duplicate them if they want to edit. This will allow us to update the original dashboards.
I'm not sure how we could add dashboards to the self monitoring project. The dashboards currently live in the runbooks project. We could add a feature that allows the metrics dashboard to pull dashboards directly from our repository, but that would exclude self-managed customers who do not have their Gitlab instances connected to the internet.
Further details
- We will need to add the recording rules that are used on gitlab.com to Omnibus.
- Some dashboards that are useful on gitlab.com may not be useful to self-managed customers.
- We need to keep in mind that such dashboards get updated regularly by the infrastructure team. We need to have a way to push these updates to users.