GitLab Enablement, 1 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Adding new pages to performance testing (and updating!)

Description

Quick introduction to the page load performance testing framework and dashboards, and how to maintain them.

A

Hi, I'm josh lambert, a product manager here at get lab, and today I thought I could bought a new tool that we have available for product managers and our engineering teams to better understand the perceived performance of the workflows that they are building. So this is the performance that end users experience as they interact with gitlab.com.

A

We have added documentation to the product manager, handbook pages. You can find a link off of the responsibilities section of the roll page, and this is underneath the part that establishes that pms are responsible for the cost, profile and user experience, and here are some links to various tools, to help pms understand that and we are adding to them of course, and we have just added the page love performance tool here, so this links off to the product processes, documentation page and provides more information.

A

So we are utilizing sitespeed, which is a performance testing framework which provides the core metrics and testing, and we take those and we display them in grafana we have a stage dashboard dedicated for each stage and you can go through and take a look at this. For example, you can see we had quite a lot of pages already instrumented. I think we're up over 70, for example across all the stages, and you can turn off some of the additional flags here.

A

If you'd like to this can help you troubleshoot and they can get a better sense of what this looks like personally. Some of the deploys can be handy, so you can understand in case there is a particular dip or other change that you want that you're interested in you can see what that was related to.

A

The other quick thing here is that each of these also references the page that is being tested here, for example. So if I click here, I can see the exact url that's being tested, um and so that's also available to make sure we understand. You know what exactly we're testing here and you can go verify that.

A

But, as you can see here, we have a wide variety of uh one parallel, one for all of our stages.

A

So getting back to how you add and maintain this the first step is you want to add or update the urls that are being tested? This is fairly easy. There is a simple list here of urls, and this is what site speed goes out and tests.

A

The key here is, you want to have the url and then an alias, so it's easier to find in site, speed and reference, so you can see here, for example, we're testing things like source code, mr list for the list of mrs generally, that the convention is, as noted here group feature and detail. It has to be one word now. The other detail here is that we have authenticated and unauthenticated options under within the is the easiest.

A

uh If you need to have a page that requires authentication note that this authenticated account doesn't have any special permissions. It is just logged in. We don't have an account right now for testing that has. You know permissions to, for example, maintainer access on certain groups.

A

um That's pretty easy: you can go ahead and submit a merge request. We have a sample one here which is linked off to and you can take a look at it. This was done by marcus and you can see again it's pretty straightforward. You can edit some urls, you can change, you can edit some aliases and overall, it's pretty easy to maintain.

A

Once you have that that done sites, people go ahead and start testing it, but it takes about eight or eight to ten hours to kind of get through its testing uh list, because we have a lot of urls we're testing. So don't be surprised if you don't see the results immediately in grafana, but uh once you have that added to the testing list, you then now need to have go ahead and add it to the griffonette page. Corfuna is what we use to make maintaining these dashboards easy and we can edit them in bulk.

A

If you want to change, for example, the metrics that we display each stage does have its own json file, and so you can take a look, for example, at the create page. If you want to see how it's laid out overall, most of stuff, you don't need to worry about, but down here. Essentially it is a row for each group and then there's some json here and then you can see how we call a function, product common page detail and we simply pass in some pretty simple parameters.

A

The chart title, the alias which you set up before in the site, speed, url and then, of course, the url itself. All you have to do is just do this, make sure you get the comma at the end, correct and you'll be all set.

A

So it's overall pretty easy if you have to add a new group again just cut and paste this little section here and then just make sure you increment a y here from one to two to three to four and that way it keeps going down the page so overall, very straightforward, very easy, and we have a sample merge request here, which you can see that updates this.

A

So in this case, we're adding a couple new urls we're tweaking some of the urls that we're testing- and this corresponds to the last, mr that we showed as well so overall, very easy, very straightforward, and if we go over to the create page here, we should now see these under the knowledge group.

A

So, let's keep heading down and again we have a lot of items being tested here. So you can see here we have wiki history with the pages wiki ascii doc, and the new charts that are now available just might take a second for these to load again because we have so many dashboards. So that's great! You can see here. This was merged yesterday and you can see we already have some of these being updated. In this case, you can see that there's not a lot of content up until just now.

A

So that's what it'll look like and you can see it's accessible pretty quickly again the site, speed changes take about eight to twenty hours, uh but the component as soon as it's merged will take effect immediately. If you have any questions, please come find me or others, and we can help you guys start it as well. Thank you so much.