Display existing issue to user after Sentry logs error for the GitLab application
Problem to solve
Often when users see the GitLab UI break, there are frontend errors in the console and occasionally we show a flash message. If we can check for existing issues for that error as we log the error to Sentry, it would be possible to surface the open issue in the flash message. This is specific to GitLab as an application. For external users of .com GitLab, they will see links to issues that we (internal GitLab) have open to address those errors.
Benefits of this change:
- Internally, this can save a lot of 'is this known?' discussions in Slack, and/or the subsequent write-up of an issue that you later realize is a duplicate
- Externally, this can help with customer communication as they encounter errors and are automatically prompted with the issue we (GitLab) has open to fix it
- This will help us dogfood our error tracking product
Intended users
- Delaney (Development Team Lead)
- Sasha (Software Developer)
- Devon (DevOps Engineer)
- Sidney (Systems Administrator)
Further details
This work supports the Error Tracking Vision.
Proposal
When we log an error to Sentry, check to see if there is a GitLab issue open for that error. If there is, surface it in the error message to the user. Here is a fake example using window.Flash
:
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