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Spike Research: How can insights.yml be enhanced to serve as a GitLab customizable analytics dashboard?

Overview

groupoptimize vision is to make GitLab the tool of choice for data-driven DevOps organizations. To achieve this one of our goals is to make Value Stream Analytics (VSA) the hub of analytics in GitLab, and customizable analytics dashboard is a core functionality in this direction.

The objective of this Spike Research is to determine the feasibility of enhancing insights.yml to be GitLab's customizable analytics dashboard.

Problem to solve

GitLab Analytics provide high value to executives. However, these reports are spread across multiple pages in GitLab and may require specific filters to be applied to be relevant. Executives' time is very valuable, and they might not know how to use GitLab to get insights that are relevant to their business.

JTBD: I want to create my own dashboards in GitLab that mirror the processes and terminology that my company is currently using.

Investigation and clarification questions:

  1. What is the future of the insights YAML format?

    Is there a new version? Should we upgrade to the new version? Will that cause breaking changes and disruption for current Insights users

  2. Can insights.yml embed in:

    VSA? Issues? Handbook (for Dogfooding)?

  3. Can we add custom drill-down link?

  4. Can we add auto page refresh to load data every 15 minutes?

  5. Can we add counters tiles in Insights with near real-time measurements - data load every 15 minutes.

  6. Can we configuration insights to allow for a collection of charts per page?

  7. Can we configuration insights frontend to request data and render a number of charts per page

  8. Wan we add markdown Table of Contents (ToC)?

Supported materials

Expected Outcome

  1. Determine Pros and cons
  2. Open issues to deliver the tasks identified by this spike
Edited by Haim Snir