GitLab Incubation Engineering - Latest, 2 Mar 2023

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From YouTube: Incubation Engineering - Service Desk - February 2023 Showcase

Description

This is the February 2023 Showcase for GitLab Service Desk SEG, highlighting recent developments and goals for the upcoming month. Marc discusses why he made the decision to work on documentation and an architectural concept and the current state of customizable email addresses for Service Desk. He also outlines metrics for measuring success and growth, and sets a goal for the upcoming month to have the custom email verification process merged and a preview of the UI available.

Showcase-Issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/service-desk/meta/-/issues/10

Find all videos in the playlist of the Service Desk SEG:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05JrBw4t0KoB04jd7TCRs9AHOms3hVsZ

You can find all resources on the Service Desk SEG handbook page :
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/service-desk/

Please subscribe to this GitLab issue if you would like to receive notifications for all future updates:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/service-desk/meta/-/issues/3

Additionally you may have a look at the feature exploration issue:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/service-desk/meta/-/issues/2

If you want to learn more about Incubation Engineering at GitLab, please visit
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/

Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:28 Restructuring and documentation
1:54 Redact Service Desk email addresses in issues
2:07 Custom email verification process
3:15 Goals

A

Hi, my name is Mark and I'm, the single engineer group for gitlab service desk- and this is the February showcase.

A

The service desk single engineer group is all about providing a complete, yet lightweight customer support, solution that seamlessly integrates with the gitlab ecosystem and brings customers support staff and developers closer together. In the last couple of weeks, we had an organizational restructuring and a new team started working on service desk, so I decided to provide context, build relationships, find suitable issues for onboarding, improve the documentation for setting up service desk locally and record a video walkthrough of this.

A

We also had questions from customers around multi-node setups and the separate email ingestion service, mailroom and I drafted a new section in our user documentation for this. Additionally, I used this as a starting point for discussion on an architectural change in the email ingestion I propose that we deprecate that separate process approach and start using sidekick worker jobs to connect to the incoming and service desk email mailboxes in a, for instance, 60. Second poll interval. This has a lot of advantages. It's easier to set up in development.

A

It reduces infrastructure and improves scalability, because sidekick itself is very scalable, easier monitoring and observability, and it's easier to integrate other service providers. For instance, API connections and it's also foundational work to directly pull custom service desk Emma boxes for specific projects. As a second iteration for my current customizable email addresses Focus.

A

In gitlab 59, we released a smaller feature that ensures customer email addresses are kept private. You now need to have at least a reporter role in a project to see the sender address of a service desk issue. In the last couple of weeks, I also worked on fully customizable email addresses for gitlab service desk and the email verification process, which is a two-step process, where you enter your SMTP credentials and your custom email address for a specific project and set up email forwarding from that email to your Project Specific service, desk email.

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We then take those settings and try to send an email with a specific sub-addressing part and a verification token to your custom email address, and if everything is set up correctly, it should land in your service desk mailbox.

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The second step is, we, then ingest the email and check whether the verification token matches, and we are able to verify that the correct from address is in place to avoid author assignment issues, I started a merge request, asked for review, but was encouraged to chunk. This large and complex, merge request down into smaller, manageable merge requests.

A

At the beginning of the week, I created the first smaller merge request, and this is currently in review, so I'm really looking forward to having this one merged in a few days and then continue with the upcoming chunks in the last Showcase Video I set up some goals for the month and I want to walk you through what I achieved, what I did not achieve and my goals for the upcoming month.

A

So I worked on the email verification process, but due to the restructuring and the complexity of delivering, this I did not succeed in finalizing it. This month, I decided to postpone the first iteration of the blog posts and new service test demonstration, video, maybe even to the release date of customizable email, addresses I, think it makes sense to have more time for progress on the feature itself.

A

I worked on improving documentation and recorded the walkthrough video for setting everything up locally and I came up with some metrics to measure success and growth, but did not Implement them yet. The first is monthly active projects on gitlab.com and self-hosted instances where service ping is activated.

A

These projects will need to have at least a certain number of service desk issues that were received in a given month. So we can see, there is activity.

A

A more complex metric would be monthly, active users for service desk. That means users that interact with service desk issues in a given month and the obvious, but also very interesting one once customizable email addresses are released. We could count the complete setups and activations of this feature. So my goal for the upcoming month is quite simple: I would like to have custom email, address, verification merged in the code base and a sneak peek of the UI and how you can set things up. So that's all take care and see you soon.