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.
This is the product direction for Monitor. If you'd like to discuss this direction directly with the product managers for Monitor, feel free to reach out to Kevin Chu (Group PM of Monitor) (GitLab, Email Zoom call).
The mission of the GitLab Monitor stage is to provide feedback on the health and performance of your system so that you can decrease the frequency and severity of incidents.
The Monitor stage directly competes in several markets defined within our Ops Section, including Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Log Management, Infrastructure Monitoring, IT Service Management (ITSM), Digital Experience Management (DEM) and Product Analytics. The total addressable market for the Monitor stage is projected to be $2.7 billion by 2024.
All of these markets are well-established and crowded, with winning companies achieving spectacular growth as businesses continue to shift online.
Successful vendors, such as market leader Datadog are leveraging a platform strategy to expand their markets (see DataDog's acquisition of Undefined Labs to expand beyond production applications to provide code insights during development, or their expansion to incident management in 2020). Competition among market leaders today is also geared toward making the whole stack observable for enterprises. New Relic's updated business model reflects the need for vendors to capture increasing footprint (and spend) of enterprises while enabling future growth by making a significant part of their business free.
The vision of the Monitor stage is to enable DevOps team to operate their application by enabling monitoring, observability, incident response, and feedback all within a single application, GitLab.
Everyone needs monitoring. We want everyone to be able to access it, without an exorbitant cost that constantly needs to be monitored, and without specialized skills to use the tools in order to get the benefit. In short, we would like Monitoring to be commoditized and democratized.
To achieve our vision, our strategy is to:
The Monitor surface area is large. Rather than continue to pursue bringing multiple products within the monitor purview to market concurrently, GitLab has consolidated the majority of its current focus to Incident Management. This allows us to complete the smart feedback loop within a single DevOps platform as a first priority. With GitLab Incident Management's development timeline, our users will benefit from the advantage of enabling collaboration for incident response within the same tool as their source code management, CI/CD, plan, and release workflows - all within the same tool. This most effectively positions GitLab to gain market traction and user adoption.
The details of what the Monitor Group is currently working on is listed in Incident Management Direction.
GitLab users previously can monitor their services and application by leveraging GitLab to install Prometheus to a GitLab managed cluster. Similarly, users can also install the ELK stack to do log aggregation and management. The advantage of using GitLab with these popular tools is that users can collaborate on monitoring in the same application they use for building and deploying their services and applications. Furthermore, developers, who do not use, or potentially because they don't have access to their organizations monitoring tool, seeing metrics for their service and cluster metrics where their application run is extremely useful.
However, we believe that our solution is niche and reliant on a foundation that will be removed as we are deprecating GitLab Managed Apps in 14.0.
What we've learned since that makes this particular strategy challenging are the following:
Monitor is a critical component for all software development and operations. The Monitor stage's tier strategy will be broken down by workflow as described below.
To execute our land and expand strategy and to receive as much feedback from our potential user base, Free contains the vast majority of the Monitor features, including metrics, logs, incident management, traces, and error management.
Limits:
Upcoming premium Monitor functionality include:
Upcoming ultimate Monitor functionality include:
Our Key Performance Indicator for the Monitor stage is the Monitor SMAU (stage monthly active users).
As of December 2020, the Monitor SMAU is based on the Incident Management category. It is the count of unique users that interact with alerts and incidents. This PI will inform us if we are on the right path to provide meaningful incident response tools.
There are a few workflows that are critical to our users in this stage.
Each of these workflows has a designated level of maturity; you can read more about our category maturity model to help you decide which categories you want to start using and when.
This workflow is planned, but not yet available.
Direction
Starting with the highest level alert, using preconfigured dashboards to review relevant metrics, enabling ad-hoc visualization and immediate drill down from time sliced metrics into logs and traces in the same screen This workflow is planned, but not yet available.
This workflow is planned, but not yet available.
Documentation • Direction
This workflow is planned, but not yet available.
Direction
There are a few product categories that are critical for success here; each one is intended to represent what you might find as an entire product out in the market. We want our single application to solve the important problems solved by other tools in this space - if you see an opportunity where we can deliver a specific solution that would be enough for you to switch over to GitLab, please reach out to the PM for this stage and let us know.
Each of these categories has a designated level of maturity; you can read more about our category maturity model to help you decide which categories you want to start using and when.
Runbooks are a collection of documented procedures that explain how to carry out a particular process, be it starting, stopping, debugging, or troubleshooting a particular system. Executable runbooks allow operators to execute pre-written code blocks or database queries against a given environment. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: low • Documentation • Direction
GitLab collects and displays performance metrics for deployed apps, leveraging Prometheus. Developers can determine the impact of a merge and keep an eye on their production systems, without leaving GitLab. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: medium • Documentation • Direction
Track incidents within GitLab, providing a consolidated location to understand the who, what, when, and where of the incident. Define service level objectives and error budgets, to achieve the desired balance of velocity and stability. This category is at the "viable" level of maturity.
Priority: high • Documentation • Direction
Track DevOps responsibilities within your team by creating rotating schedules for responders. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: high • Documentation • Direction
GitLab makes it easy to view the logs distributed across multiple pods and services using log aggregation with Elastic Stack. Once Elastic Stack is enabled, you can view your aggregated Kubernetes logs across multiple services and infrastructure, go back in time, conduct infinite scroll, and search through your application logs from within the GitLab UI itself. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: medium • Documentation • Direction
Tracing provides insight into the performance and health of a deployed application, tracking each function or microservice which handles a given request. This makes it easy to understand the end-to-end flow of a request, regardless of whether you are using a monolithic or distributed system. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: medium • Documentation • Direction
Self-managed GitLab instances come out of the box with great observability tools, reducing the time and effort required to maintain a GitLab instance.
Priority: low • Documentation • Direction
Error tracking allows developers to easily discover and view the errors that their application may be generating. By surfacing error information where the code is being developed, efficiency and awareness can be increased. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: medium • Documentation • Direction
Proactively simulate, monitor, and report on success rates and executions for user actions and behavior pathways.
Priority: low • Direction
This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: medium • Documentation
There are a number of other issues that we've identified as being interesting that we are potentially thinking about, but do not currently have planned by setting a milestone for delivery. Some are good ideas we want to do, but don't yet know when; some we may never get around to, some may be replaced by another idea, and some are just waiting for that right spark of inspiration to turn them into something special.
Remember that at GitLab, everyone can contribute! This is one of our fundamental values and something we truly believe in, so if you have feedback on any of these items you're more than welcome to jump into the discussion. Our vision and product are truly something we build together!
