Add a new field to metrics definition files to indicate a metric is used for customer health scoring

Release notes

Problem to solve

Many Service Ping metrics today are used as part of customer health scoring (CHS). CHS helps account teams identify customers that may need extra help using GitLab, could possibly churn, or may be interested in expansion. CHS relies on underlying data being consistent over time so that changes can be easily identified and attributed to the customer doing something differently.

A problem today is that it is difficult to know specifically which metrics are used for CHS and which are not. This results in metrics being updated without knowing beforehand that they are being used for CHS. This then causes a large change in CHS values, even though the customer has not done anything differently.

Proposal

1. Update the performance_indicator_type field in the metrics definition files to be able to take multiple values.
2. Introduce a new option to be added to the performance_indicator_type field which indicates that the value is used for customer health scoring.
   • The name of this field should not be specific to a technology (i.e. not used_by_gainsight) but should instead reflect that it is used for customer health scoring (some examples may be used_for_customer_health_scoring, health_score_metric, customer_health_score_value, customer_health_score, etc)
3. Update any downstream systems that depend on performance_indicator_type to be able to handle multiple values.
4. Update documentation to describe the field, the new options, why it exists, and the impact of it.
5. Update documentation to indicate that when this field is set to true, any changes or updates to the metric should trigger a ping and review by the Customer Success team.

As a follow-on to this issue being implemented, this change should be broadly communicated to the product & engineering teams, customer success teams, and any other groups consuming metrics.

Open questions:

1. Can we get a list of existing CHS metrics from Customer Success to pre-populate this field for all relevant metrics?
   • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-data/analytics/-/blob/master/transform/snowflake-dbt/data/health_score_metrics.csv
   • As part of this issue, consider updating all existing metric definition files to reflect this and use the new performance_indicator_type value. If that is a lot of work, create and schedule a new issue for it.

Intended users

Feature Usage Metrics

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