Problem Validation: Show seat utilization over time

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This issue aims to be an MVC for Visualize seat utilization over time.

Problem to solve

Admins and group owners cannot see a clear correlation between their seat usage and billing. They are not able to easily identify when and where a user was added (which contributed to seat usage), who should not have been added or accidentally added.

In cases where seat over-usage has occurred, resulting in additional costs, it should be possible to track down the cause of the seat over-usage.

Example of over-usage scenario:

  • we are trying to solve for a scenario where the over-usage was unexpected or unwanted
  • mostly this means that at some point in the subscription period, there were users taking up seats that the admin/owner did not intend for
  • the users added most recently are not always the unintended users
  • finding the unintended users is the main goal, noting that an unintended user could've been added on day 1 or day 100 of the subscription period

User experience goal

A simple, intuitive way to see when, where (i.e location) and by whom a seat was taken + a running tally on the max and billable seat counts as user events impact them.

Proposal

A log or list that shows:

  1. the date of the event (user is added and takes up a seat)
  2. the username taking up a seat
  3. the location of the user (mostly useful for SaaS)
  4. the new max count after this event
  5. nice to have: indicate if this event will incur additional charges

Some of the information we need already exists in audit events feature, however, this log has limitations on which events it shows and isn't intuitive enough for showing how the events will affect billing and seat usage.

Ideally, we could iterate to use the list/log info to build a graph as in Visualize seat utilization over time.

Permissions and Security

Only group owners or instance admins should be able to see this information.

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

A reduction in support tickets about billable members and seat over-usage. I.e it should be easy to see which users are being billed, when they started being billed and at which point additional charges were triggered.

Support Priority Score: 31

Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖