GitLab UX Team, 27 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Vision for Runner Fleet Enterprise Management: Search and filter edition

Description

Gina Doyle (Product Designer, Verify:Runner & Testing) walks through the Runner Fleet Enterprise Management search and filter vision. These are aspirational mock-ups that set the direction and will evolve and change over time, they are not definitive. We look forward to hearing your feedback on the visionary mockups! Please leave comments in any of the epics and issues linked below.

Mega epic: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4015 (Admin view usability improvements specific epic: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5665)
Vision issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/343810

A

Hi everyone, I'm gina doyle and I'm the product designer for verify runner and testing. Today, I wanted to walk you through our vision for runner enterprise management, specifically looking at search and filter. The vision is not a representation of what is currently implemented or provided with a specific timeline. The mock-ups I'll be showing are not definitive, but are an ideal point that we would like to move towards with every iteration that we make to start.

A

I just wanted to give some background to what our goals are with enterprise management and highlight the panes in the current search and filter process. Enterprise management is focused on providing admins with a bird's eye view and configuration management capabilities to administer a fleet which would be tens of thousands of gitlab runners easily. This can include jobs like locating runner and taking a specific action on it.

A

I'm going to now jump over to the current admin view to walk you through a use case where the pain points with the current search and filter experience are highlighted.

A

So, let's imagine I'm an admin who has groups in their organization who are registering tens of thousands of runners, I'm responsible for finding answers to knowing the groups and projects that each runner belongs to, so that I could then identify an owner and then seeing their last activity date. So from here I'm able to search and filter by a few different attributes here and then I can also filter by the runner description here, but I can't filter by something like the runner numerical id.

A

From this view. I would probably just look at my group runners in this case. I only have four. So it's pretty easy to determine that and then from here I could theoretically sort by created date or last contact date from here, though, I'm only given that it's a group runner, I'm not given the information of which group that this is assigned to and then, if I were, to click into details here, I actually don't even know which group this is assigned to from this view either.

A

I would actually have to navigate into the menu to see my groups and then go into settings and runners from there. So it's a pretty tedious, workflow right now to solve these problems. We would have to greatly enhance the table view and the search and filter experience, and now I'm going to jump over to the visionary mock-ups to show how we have focused on improving those.

A

So the first thing here is that you can see we provided these overall counts of different statuses that are important and would allow admins to quickly complete their tasks. For example, locating how many runners are online.

A

We also can allow filtering from these. So if I were to select online, I could see all of my online runners and know really quickly that there's 16 total.

A

We emphasize the importance of runner types assuming that these are still in play and provide totals for each. So it's clear how many runners you're dealing with so this is centered around these different tabs. You can see all of them at once that are defined by the type within the list, or you can drill down into specific types and see all the instance runners, for example.

A

We also enhance the filter attributes by including more than just three so before we were only seeing status, type and tags, and now we've expanded that to include much more, which would include some of the attributes of runners that you see in details today, as well as some of the assigned groups or projects that a runner is affiliated with as well as jobs. So if there was a job that was failing and you knew the job name, you could come in here filter by that job and then get the runner.

A

We can use the different attributes to recommend actions. So, for example, if I were to filter by a project here, um I can filter by ending in my org and then at this point now. I can see that I could click on these to apply specific actions. um So we can. We could apply bulk actions at this point and include more actions than just pause and delete.

A

We could also use recommendations based off of these larger counts up here, so the stale runners, for example, would be considered runners that have not contacted gitlab in a certain amount of time.

A

We could then provide recommendations to delete those, or we could maybe even automatically delete those and surface and alert saying that they are going to be deleted at a certain date and time.

A

Lastly, we could surface these updates that are available, so that's specifically around the versions of runners that are outdated and by improving the filter experience as well. You can easily see how many runners are in each version and then maybe even provide a bulk update, if that's possible.

A

So by making some of these improvements, we can make our users jobs much easier and allow them to official efficiently complete their tasks. This is a vision, that's not definitive, like I said before. So if you have any feedback on what you're seeing today, I would love to hear from you and so with the rest of the runner team. I will be linking the mega link to the mega epic for enterprise management, as well as the issue for this vision, and you can comment on either and we'll keep our eyes out. Thank you.