a way to collect more data for self-hosted instance

Problem to solve

as people responsible for hosting company-internal instance of GitLab, we have no clear visibility of its usage. For example we can't automatically measure how many people/teams use specific feature regularly and make decisions base on that.

Intended users

Manager, Team Lead, DevOps Engineer

Further details

GitLab is growing very fast in many areas. Not every area is already "lovable" and we don't use every of them yet. But we'd like to monitor development progress and make decisions of adopting them more widely as soon as it is feature complete from our perspective. So one of the information we'd like to collect is feature adoption across development teams. For that, we would like to have as many data as possible. Example scenario I could imagine would be writing a query (may be SQL) to same data analysis system to see how many users use issue board to edit issue in GitLab more than once per day and present that data grouped by GitLab groups those people belongs to. Thanks to that we may know when it's a good time to stop maintain other issue tracker systems in company.

Proposal

All the data are already available in GitLab logs. So some way of extracting it and uploading to data analytics tool (meltano maybe?) is one of the option Other option would be javascript included in GitLab frontend to send information about usage.

Permissions and Security

Ideally that would share GitLab permission model - admin can see all instance data.

Documentation

Testing

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

What is the type of buyer?

That would be useful on every self-hosted plan to make decisions easier. Like for example if we want to go with bigger plan.

Links / references