Incident Tag MVC
Release notes
Problem to solve
As an incident responder, I want to capture relevant incident timestamps, so that I can construct an accurate incident timeline and provide reporting for learning and improvement.
Right now, the only timestamps we capture for incidents are issue creation time or closure. Unfortunately, issue creation or closure may or may not correspond to the actual incident start or end time.
Accurately capturing the incident start and end time is important because it allows teams to more accurately track metrics for ongoing efficiency reporting. Capturing these metrics also allows for potentially interesting analysis further down the line, such as a scatter plot of impact start by time of day, or avg response time by day of week.
Intended users
- Incident responders
User experience goal
Ensure that the systems we're putting in place will result in accurate incident reporting
Proposal
For a first iteration, we will allow incident responders to define the incident start and end time. Additional timestamp categories will be added in future, as part of #360315 (closed).
To allow users to define a tag, we'll utilize the existing "add timeline event" form, introducing a new "event type" dropdown. As a first pass, the options in this dropdown will include start time and end time.
If someone selects a timestamp from the event type dropdown, the comment field will pre-populate with either Incident start time or Incident end time, depending on what's selected. That text can be edited by the user before saving.
Here's how that would look:
Further details
More discussion in #241730 (comment 605624766)
Vocabulary/definitions
- Every timeline record is an
event - An event may or may not have a
tag(to differentiate from labels) - A tag is something with a specific definition that may be reused across incidents
- There are GitLab defined
tags- in the future, there may be customer definedtagsand calculation based on custom tags. - A comment is a user provided input associated to an event
- An event must have 1 comment. If a tag is selected we will pre-populate the comment field for users to edit.
- An event can have 0 or more tags






