The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
Error Tracking is the process of proactively identifying application errors and fixing them as quickly as possible. Errors are often plentiful, noisy, and challenging to dig through to find the important ones that are impacting users. The best tools provide sorting and filtering by a variety of error attributes, information regarding the commit that likely caused the error, a detailed stack trace, and a set of useful actions such as ignore or resolve that help users to clear out errors they no longer need to pay attention to.
At GitLab, this functionality is based on an integration with Sentry which aggregates errors found by Sentry, surfaces them in the GitLab UI, and provides tools to triage and respond to the critical ones. GitLab leverages Sentry's intelligence to provide pertinent information such as the user impact or commit that caused the bug. Throughout the triage process, users have the option of creating GitLab issues on critical errors to track the work required to fix them, all without leaving GitLab.
At a 30,000 ft view, adding Error Tracking to GitLab drives the single app for the DevOps lifecycle vision and works to speed up the broader DevOps workflow. We can eliminate an additional interface from the multitude of tools Developers are required to use each day to do their jobs. Furthermore, GitLab has the opportunity to surface errors early and often in the development process. By surfacing errors caused by a particular commit, merge request, or release, we can easily prevent our user's customers from experiencing the bug at all. GitLab's ownership of the development workflow makes it simple to remove additional interfaces from the tool chain which will decrease time spent and increase throughput.
Our vision is to surface important errors, reducing the time spent triaging, responding and remediating errors, all within GitLab.
The primary persona for Error Tracking is Sasha the Software Developer. Tracking and triaging errors is a part of any release process and the individual most qualified to solve the error is the developer who wrote the code. Secondarily, we've aimed our Error Tracking offering at Priyanka the Platform Engineer who uses Error Tracking to investigate spikes in errors in production.
This category is currently at the minimal maturity level, and our next maturity target is viable (see our definitions of maturity levels).
As of now (January 2021), we are not actively working on Error Tracking while we make other categories in GitLab equally as awesome (check out Incident Management). Once we determine what comes next for error tracking, we will add more detail to this section. If you wish to contribute to the next features and improvements we work on, please take a look at the Error Tracking and Error Tracking, like Sentry backend but inside GitLab epics.
We will know we are on the right trajectory for Error Tracking when we are able to observe the following: