DRI: @smcgivern CURRENT POC LINK: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/gl-infra/platform/stage-groups-index/ ## Background In https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/gl-infra/-/epics/754 we discuss the idea of creating a Platform Engineering tool. The idea is not yet fully formed and we are looking at the different problems that a tool would solve. One of the problems we have is that the data we provide to EMs and PMs is available in many locations. For example: 1. Stage group dashboard 2. Error budget dashboard 3. Error budget report 4. Infradev report 5. Tamland (in some cases) 6. Ad-hoc Thanos queries 7. Ad-hoc Kibana queries We frequently get questions to provide data when the data is already provided - the manager just wasn't aware of it or didn't know where to find it. ## Proposal A reasonable first iteration to resolve the problem of undiscoverable data is to provide an index to the data we already release. Because the majority of our data is displayed through Grafana, we could use that for our index. Create a set of Grafana dashboards (either using the existing stage group dashboards directly, or linking to them) that act as an index for a stage group to use to find the sources of information listed above. Any metrics shown on this new page should be very high level, with all detailed views left to other dashboards / resources. We want to work closely with a set of stage groups to validate that this is useful for them. We may want to consider a separate Grafana instance for this. This could make cross-linking harder, but the current instance (dashboards.gitlab.net) can be quite overwhelming: the home page is the infrastructure-focused Platform Triage dashboard, and there are a lot of dashboards and folders that aren't immediately useful for PMs and EMs. We shouldn't be wedded to using a dashboard: if the user feedback dictates, we could consider a static site, handbook page (internal or external), or even something similar to the error budget reports. ### Items to capture somewhere 1. Include DB usage: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/gl-infra/-/epics/756 2. Include GraphQL operations: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/create-stage/source-code-be/-/issues/46#note_1162705681 ## Exit criteria 1. Validate this new index with three stage groups 1. Stage group X 2. Stage group Y 3. Stage group Z ## Status 2022-12-§3 We have a demo with the MVC that we want to share at https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/gl-infra/platform/stage-groups-index/. This updates daily. We are collecting feedback for possible next steps in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/scalability/-/issues/2056.