As a Support Engineer at GitLab, the majority of your time will be focused on helping customers solve problems. This happens mostly through tickets, but can also happen through issues, screensharing calls, and emergencies.
While working through various customer problems, you may need help. We have a wide and talented team that can help you at many levels:
At GitLab, the Support Team currently manages 2 different Zendesk Instances:
We recommend reviewing the best practices and suggestions for styling and responding to Zendesk tickets.
Just as Support team members are expected to adhere to GitLab's Code of Conduct, we also expect customers to treat the Support Team with the same level of respect. The GitLab Community Code of Conduct outlines the standards to which we hold the wider GitLab Community.
If you notice a ticket where you believe the customer to be violating the Code of Conduct, please tag the Manager On-Call to respond with the following guidelines in our Statement of Support.
We encourage all engineers to contribute to the product to help improve the customer experience directly.
When you are creating merge requests (in the gitlab-org group) for code or for documentation, the
Support Team Contributions
label is applied automatically so that we can track product contributions by support team
members.
Additionally, if the code change is specifically to improve the team's efficiency
(such as changes to admin for faster support), then add the ~"Support Efficiency"
label.
We also recommend using weight labels (frontend, backend, docs) to track the effort required for MRs. While you can look at how others have labelled their MRs, the most important thing is that you are consistent in applying the labels to your own MRs so that you can see which MRs required the most effort and your overall progress. The number of MRs and their total weight are included in the 1:1 generator reports.
An issue is created in the support-team-meta
issue tracker at the
end of each week with a list of support team contributions merged in the past week. View the
list of summary issues here.
json_stats
(analyze JSON logs), strace_parser
(analyze strace
output), gitlabsos
(get all logs and other data from customers), etc.