GitLab Ops Section, 9 Jun 2022

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From YouTube: 2022-06-09 Ops Engineering Showcase (APAC)

Description

Ops Engineering Showcase APAC session for June 2022

Epic: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/-/epics/115

Today's demo:

- Incident Timelines: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/6376

A

uh Hi everyone, this uh welcome to the ops engineering showcase for the apec um apac friendly time. uh Today we have one demo by jason and he will be talking about uh incident timelines and yeah. I do do you wanna go ahead and start yeah.

B

Sure um so I've dropped a link to the epic and designs in the agenda. um If you want to take a look and yeah I'll share my screen and just show um a really quick uh demo of what we've been working on um so I'll just share my screen.

B

Just zoom in a little bit um yeah, so hopefully you can see on my local gdk um an incident list um yeah, so you can access this under monitor incidents.

B

um These are these can be manually, created or um auto, created from alerts um that that come into getlab, um yeah and I'll pop into an incident and show the new feature, which is the timeline um yeah, so incidents if you haven't seen before they look a lot like uh issues they're based on the same code, um so they share a bunch of common, much common stuff and then more or less it's got.

B

It got a few features removed and a few features added to reflect the different use case in this case we're going to look at the timeline.

B

So this the idea behind this is it's primarily aimed at like sres and incident response users.

B

And it will be used in both during and while an incident is occurring and also afterwards um as like a um postmortem um retrospective tool, um yeah so similar to the system. Notes concept that we haven't issues except the main difference is that you can see they're grouped by day and they can be added with a specific time in mind.

B

So system notes just happen when they happen, but um the timeline will uh you can specify like something happened in the past, so you want it to pop up to the top of the timeline um yeah, so I'll go ahead and add a new timeline event um see at the moment. This is still a work in progress. It's pretty um pretty basic, but you can see it like.

B

You can specify a time you can say some events happened.

B

um I could select a in the past and then we'll see the event appear. um Yeah, and you can at the moment on this branch you can delete and edit it is also coming um yeah, that's pretty much it.

B

um One thing that that will be interesting to know is that um there are a bunch of different types of timeline: events that that a user will be able to add um at the moment it's it's just comments with um some basic like a really basic subset of get lab, flavoured markdown, which is contains just bold italics, links and tags like tagging users, which is to yeah just to keep to keep it simpler um to allow um the timeline to not get filled up with too much noise like visual noise, um if you could add like the full markdown set and yeah, then that could cause that issue um also status.

B

Changes on the internet, um publishing incident status to a status page if you have that set up and um like creating the incident from an alert. So this will contain that background information um and then another feature that's being worked on is um adding a timeline event from a system um and and also there's gonna, be a slash demand. um I slashed my shortcut for this as well um yeah. So that's that's.

B

What's been developed so far, um I thought it might be interesting for people to hear about either from like a feature perspective of like this is what's coming or if you're interested in um like the sre workflow.

B

um This could be interesting, um probably worth mentioning the that the first customer for this is our internal asari team. So we've been designing it to be dog-footed. um I mean um yeah.

C

So that's the that's.

B

That's kind of the first use case that we're aiming at um and yeah, possibly the other interesting thing is just if, from a dead perspective, um you might want to know it might be useful to know like the parts of the code that are being reused and updated and stuff so like, for instance, the we updated this markdown um editor to support um to add an extra field that lets you select exactly which features to support and those can be enabled and disabled in the view component, and then they won't show up in the in the uh um yeah and and on that specific note, I think our back end has a custom markdown.

B

Like endpoint for creating the html, which works with the exact ones, that we've enabled slash disabled so um yeah, if, if anyone was thinking of like doing their own custom um set of markdown that they wanted to support, then yeah. Here's an example of that. Thank you. Good luck!

B

um Yeah. I see that there's some questions, um so I have a lot of details.

A

um Yeah, um thank you. Thank you. So much for showing this. This looks pretty cool. I I went into my test project and I couldn't see it so I'm assuming it's either under uh behind feature picture flag or is it under development still.

B

um Yeah, it's still under development, so it's behind a development feature flag, yep um we're aiming to remove it the flag and 15 top one.

B

But yeah these things, I'm not going to make a total 100 promise there to make it into 15 months, but yeah. That's the plan at the moment.

A

Yeah, that's cool. It looks really nice uh myself. Do you want to voice your question.

D

uh Yeah, I was just wondering what other kinds of details do you think you'll be throwing into the those individual uh entries, because, right now it's pretty basic. So I was wondering if you're going to put in like reporter, who who's reporting the the item who, like the date or time it was updated or changed added that kind of stuff.

B

um Yeah, I think I think the idea is to try and differentiate it from um system notes to only include things that are relevant, for instance, um but definitely the reporting of the incident would be useful.

B

um There's also talk of adding another feature, to instance, which is the um I think it's like dr, a dri type concept um versus like assignee, so the um that would like show up at the top of the incident, and so you can see on the timeline when someone has assigned themselves that role. I think that that's definitely far in the future, though, that it's um yeah just a concept um yeah.

C

Yeah off the top.

B

Of my head, I'm not sure what else we're adding soon to this. But um apart from what I've seen in the design um yeah but there's there's some discussion on the ebook about um different things that can be added.

A

Any plans to show like a visual graph of the timeline. You know, like maybe significant events that happen or something.

B

um Yeah good question: I'm not sure yeah.

A

B

A

It'd be interesting, I think.

B

Yeah we somewhere, we have a um like a we've done, like some design discussions with the sre team. um So that's one of the basics of the the initial feature set um yeah. I don't remember that coming up during that, but um yeah that does sound like a useful feature.

A

Yeah cool and like I I had another question in terms of like uh how it's been how the incidents are used. I haven't used them myself, but are there any plans to like integrate the chat up? So you know when you create an incident and the chat ups, it's created on your project or something like that.

B

Yes, that that's a big upcoming um focus for us is chat. Ups um yeah, so there's another epic floating around, which I can find and link here, which is um about the about slack integration.

B

um So initially we're going to focus some features on um like checkouts features on slack specifically um and build out the the integration there. I believe, there's even some that there's a group of people and get like being talking to slack about um supporting chat ups better as well so um yeah there's.

B

Definitely some some like good features that can.

D

Be added there.

B

And it would for sure be integrated with incidents um yeah. So I'd expect to see at some point in the future one once that channel stuff is built um yeah that definitely makes sense to be added for some of those events. We added to the timeline.

A

Yeah yeah nice. Well, it looks it looks really interesting. uh Thanks for sharing that uh did anyone else have any questions.

A

You know any any other uh impromptu demos. Anyone want to show share.

A

No, it's a long shot.

A

If not, then I guess we can stop the recording.

D

A

Yeah, thank you. Thank you all for coming today. uh This.

C

A

Just a reminder: this is a monthly um thing that we have. We don't have a lot of participation in apec, so it'll be cool if we get a few more people showing them when their work and yeah just remember it's just a friendly space just to show, even if it's rough under development, that's what we'd like to see so yeah.

C

Oh yeah, I have a question there so.

D

Is this should.

C

We demo something that has been like merged in production, or do we oh.

A

C

Got it so anything yeah.

A

Okay, okay, any work in progress, even if it's a poc and you know we're not sure we're gonna, actually merge it or not all those kinds of things, because at the end of the day, it's for people in the in the department to know what everyone else is working on and yeah to get a bit of collaboration. If possible.

C

A

All right, then, I'm gonna go ahead and stop the recording. Thank you. Everyone.