Display notification to upgrade runners in Admin Area > Runners

Release notes

As the number of installed runners in your organization increases to hundreds or thousands, it becomes more challenging to determine which runners are outdated. Failing to update runner versions doesn't just mean you aren't using the latest features - it could also mean that you aren't taking advantage of security fixes. In the Admin Area Runners view, a new upgrade status badge with values, upgrade recommended, and upgrade available allows you to identify at a glance which runners in our environment need updating. This feature makes it easier to maintain your runner fleet and mitigate the risks of using outdated versions.

Description

Much like our Admin Panel shows notifications when the server version needs to be upgraded, we should do the same thing with runners. There a lots of times where a new server version will deprecate support for a certain runner version. There should be some kind of warning in the Runner panel (/admin/runners) with the same kind of notification beside the runner version.

Proposal

Add a warning/notification when someone needs to upgrade a runner based on server version and runner supportability.

Available Tier

Ultimate

This feature is available for customers in Ultimate as it is one foundational feature supporting the vision of providing enterprise customers a birds-eye view, configuration management capabilities, and predictive analytics to administer a fleet of GitLab Runners easily.

Customers in GitLab Free or Premium could also benefit from this feature set. However, based on customer feedback, customers in Ultimate, either on GitLab SaaS or Self-Managed, typically manage large fleets (100s to 1,000s) of Runners at the instance, group, or project level.

To provide some context as to the scale we are referring to for this feature set, one customer's Runner Fleet profile is as follows:

• 60k registered runners
• 1M CI builds per month