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Admin area version mgmt: Add labels to communicate runners are outdated

Overview

It isn't easy to get a sense of where your runner fleet is at, version-wise. As the count of runners in your enterprise grows, it becomes increasingly important to have an accurate view of the runners' state in use from a security and compliance perspective. As a first step to providing you that data in an easy to consume format, we will add a total of how many runners in your fleet have available updates and a badge to specific runners to notify you that they have updates available

Problem to solve

As described in the UX scorecard recommendations, it is difficult to know the following when looking at the runner admin list view:

  1. The most recent version of runners (where should my runners be?)
  2. Runners that are behind that version ^ (how many are behind? how many are more than 2 versions behind?)
  3. Runners that have updates available Having an overall view of this, without having to paginate through all the runners, is important for Priyanka to carry out her JTBDs.

Things to note:

  • The vision is to provide users a single pane of glass, a birds eye view if you will that tells the user at a glance key information regarding their runner fleet
  • Users (developers, administrators etc) typically do not care about when things are going right, they typically only care about when things go wrong

Intended users

User experience goal

Priyanka should be able to easily identify where their fleet is related to the most recent runner version and update seamlessly if necessary.

Proposal

As this first iteration, we will only add badges to identify which runners have upgrades available vs upgrades recommended.

  • Add a upgrade available or upgrade recommended badge to runners in the runners table

🎨 See the design in design management

Design specs

✨ Figma

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

Disclaimer

This page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features, or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.

Edited by Gina Doyle