Capture installation creation date
Both the Customer Success and Product Data Insights teams have expressed interest in installation creation dates, which are currently not recorded. An installation is a unique combination of a uuid
(also known as an "instance") and a hostname
. We have creation dates for uuid
s and hostname
s individually, but because hostname
s can be recycled across instances (for example gitlab
is a popular hostname), the hostname creation date does not reflect the installation creation date.
The core use case for CS is the ability to measure from the time the production instance started to when they began to realize value (e.g., when certain Product health measures are "green" which serves as a proxy for the customer is getting fuller value from GitLab).
The ideal state is for the source data to record each creation of a new uuid-hostname combination.
Proposal
Add a new metric which can be used to see when a GitLab installation was created.
- This metric should be able to work for both existing instances and new instances.
- Note: This means that adding a new metric that can only record data for newly installed instances (such as
uuid+hostname
) should not be used, since it won't be usable for existing instances.
- Note: This means that adding a new metric that can only record data for newly installed instances (such as
Use the date that the root
/id=1
user was created (based on their database entries created_at
).
- This should be usable for all existing instances as well as newly created ones
- Open question: Is this a good proxy to use for Gitlab installation? Are there any workflows where this user would not be created at the same time as the instance?