Add notification badge to Admin area

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Problem to solve

If you want your self-hosted GitLab installation to always be up-to-date, you have currently different options:

  • Check daily apt-get for an update => Don't think that someone is doing it
  • Use RSS feed of the GitLab blog => Annoying as the blog is not splittet into an release blog and an everything-else-blog
  • Go to admin area and check the result of the update check there => When Admin Mode is enabled, you have always to enter this mode just for the update check

It should be easier to see everything admin related issues.

Intended users

User experience goal

The admin should receive notification of admin related issues without having to check for themselves.

Proposal

Add a notification badge to the Admin Area icon in header:

image

The dropdown should contain the notification. See here (collapsed screenshot section) how it looks on Jenkins.

Further details

The notification icon could handle different issues:

  • Feature/Bugfix update available => hint
  • Critical update available => warning
  • Low disk space (e.g. <20%) => hint
  • Low disk space (e.g. <5%) => warning
  • License expires soon => hint
  • License expired (grace period) => warning
  • ...

In general:

  • Warnings: Immediate attention required => Ignoring this may lead to interruption of the service)
  • Hints: Attention recommended => may lead to a warning in future

Badge:

  • No warning/hint => no badge
  • Warnings & hints => red -> Only hints => orange

Permissions and Security

Maybe it is not wanted that this information are available when the admin didn't entered the Admin Mode. In this case the badge with the numbers should be shown and you will the notification just after enter the admin area. So you can disable the notification details via an option. But I don't think this is necessary as you usually can't do anything bad just with these information (and that the installation is not up-to-date can already checked by every user).

Available Tier

  • Free
  • Premium/Silver
  • Ultimate/Gold

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

The admin doesn't need to explicitly check for admin related issues (instead it will be visibile even if you are working just on your normal projects).

Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖