Expand deployment tracking for external / API annotation
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Our current deployment tracking is tightly integrated with our Auto DevOps/CD solution. While it is fine for that use case, there are many valid use-cases that are not covered, like external integrations that are not based on Auto DevOps or not using GitLab CD.
To put this into context, our own deployment is not trackable by GitLab, because it is done outside of GitLab own CD.
While the counter-argument here would be that we should use our own CD our selves, that is missing the point that there are valid workflows that would not use it ever.
As an example, GitHub does have a way to flag a specific commit as part of a deploy, via API: https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/deployments/#list-deployments (here is what we have for our own Deployment API: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/deployments.html). That allows to do all the CRUD operations and is used extensively by external integrations.
If we have something similar to that, that would also help us, for example, to expose the deployments to our Grafana metrics. Right now there is no way to do that as we are not tracking it anywhere.