Add ability to load "test" Prometheus data natively into an environment
Problem to solve
As a developer and tester of applications I frequently want to test the capabilities of my monitoring system. It should be possible to easily load test Prometheus data into my environment to utilize when performing CI jobs.
Intended users (in priority order)
- Application Developers - Developers wishing to test their code want to quickly understand the status of their observability.
- Operations Teams - Operations team members who would like to test the observability of a system might like to provide alert triggering sample data as part of their verification pipeline to ensure alert routing and other configuration is setup properly.
- QE - QE teams would like to populate observability data to test their applications observability and response during CI
- Demo Environments - This feature would also be useful to those performing product demos to have a specific environment setup that is pre-populated with Prometheus data and ready to be demo'd.
- GitLab Developers - When developing our monitoring features it is useful to have the ability to quickly inject sample data into prometheus as part of a CI pipeline
Further details
Benefits are primarily ease of use, so the more simple and out-of-the-box ready we can make this feature the better.
Proposal
Determine a filepath and naming structure for this data (.gitlab/monitoring/staging_prometheus_data.csv
). If a file is present then it is automatically loaded into the proper environments prometheus server.