Increase Staging Ref adoption and gather feedback

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• Close this issue

Staging Ref has become available for Engineering in its first iteration on 2022-01-13. The next step would be to gather feedback and investigate what can be improved:

• Gather feedback on Staging Ref - What should be improved and added?
• Explore how to increase Staging Ref adoption: improve documentation, add more features/test data, address feedback

Staging Ref usage activity

One of the ways to track Staging Ref activity is to monitor users count in https://staging-ref.gitlab.com/admin/users. It lists all users that were signed up and it has information about last activity.

Usage Examples

Listing some of the usage examples when Staging Ref was chosen for testing engineering features:

• Enabled Puma metrics server for Memory team testing activities
• Switch to gitlab-sshd daemon for infrastructure and Source Code teams testing activities
• Added Gitaly queue limits for Gitaly team testing activities
• Fix missing Sidekiq metrics on staging-ref - Memory team
• Snowplow
• ElasticSearch upgrade so we can officially support OpenSearch - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/79949
• UX team member used Staging Ref to test feature that required admin access on Staging