Greetings all my name is jason collier, I'm the support operations manager here at git lab and today we're going to go over how usage ping request works. So let me share my screen and we'll get started.

So we have here is the usage ping request project. um This basically just contains the html files that will generate the web form that users will use for the requests.

This is done through gitlab ci cd and get lab pages. If we look in the public folder and the index.html, we can see that what we basically have here is just a form. It's asking for the external url of their instance. The email address it has them submit and we've got some javascript here. uh It basically is just taking the information they're, providing and sending this to a zap to your web book. See here and that'll actually work the submission from there.

It will then redirect the page to say thanks for your submission, you'll receive an email shortly, confirming your submission.

As I said, this works through gitlab cicd. So we can look at that file and see that we're using alpine latest for the image we have a stage deploy. The script doesn't actually do anything because all it's doing is making this artifact the public folder, and it's only doing this for commits to master. This will then work for get lab. Ci cd, and that is how we will get our web form now from there. This is the script that zap here will work. It's after we'll, take the request and then send it to this script.

uh Going over how this works, I import requests. I don't believe this is actually required in zapp here, but better safe than sorry. I have a function called body. It takes the host name and the email provided by the user, and it basically just makes a message of to whom it may concern. I request the deletion of usage ping data related to the host name of my gitlab instance, their host name and then thank you.

The subject is usage ping request and then the host name is passed in there as well.

Beyond that we get to the actual script itself, which is the email is what they've entered the host name is what they've entered the url we're using is mail gun, and the reason for this is we're going to send an api request to mail gun we're going to make it from tech support at gitlab.com.

We're going to make the 2 address the service desk address for the instant for the project, we're going to make the subject the one we've defined above the text, the body we've defined above and we're going to actually set the reply to to the email they provided. This way, what happens is it'll generate the service desk request as the user, and when we reply to it, we can actually communicate with them if we sent it from tech support app without the reply to there'd be no way to actually communicate to the requester itself.

After that, we're using the request library to make a post request to the mail gun api using the uh what we've called files here with the authentication of api and the input data of the key from there. It will generate an issue in the correct project and everything will go from there. That's all there is to how that works. I hope you found this educational and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.