Licensing & Renewals

Licensing & Renewals (L&R) comprises efforts to resolve problems customers face when they purchase or renew their GitLab subscription.

Overview

L&R Support Engineers help resolve problems encountered by customers in the process of purchasing or renewing a GitLab subscription.

L&R work generally involves collaborating with customers and other GitLab teams, primarily Sales and Fulfillment, as well as checking internal GitLab systems and performing data validation. Some examples:

  • Answering general queries from a user about purchasing and managing a subscription
  • Troubleshooting license upload errors and subscription association issues
  • Assisting Sales team members with requests related to L&R

History

In July, 2020, a decision was made for L&R work to be handled by Support for the foreseeable future. At the time, business-critical priorities prevented the Fulfillment product section from having sufficient capacity to address and resolve the major L&R-related issues. And whereas creating an entirely new team for this work would have been difficult, Support was already engaged and was in a position to scale up quickly to meet customer needs.

Contacts

Support Management contacts

  • Overall DRI: Shaun McCann
  • Regional DRIs: Mike Dunninger, John Lyttle, Ket Slaats
  • Coordinating Mechanizer maintenance: Ronnie Alfaro

Support Stable Counterparts

See the Fulfillment section description in the Product Handbook to learn who our current Support Stable Counterparts are. If you are interested in being an L&R SSC, please talk with your manager and one of the Regional DRIs.

Direction

In collaboration with Sales, Fulfillment and other teams we aim to improve the customer experience related to managing subscriptions. We achieve this by:

  • automating processes
  • suggesting improvements to processes
  • reporting and fixing bugs
  • meeting our Service Level Objectives to external and internal customers

Regional L&R Teams

  • AMER Team Page
  • APAC Team Page
  • EMEA Team Page

Information for Support Engineers with L&R responsibilities

Before starting to work L&R tickets, be sure you complete the L&R / Subscriptions training module.

Core Concepts

As an L&R Engineer, you will want to understand some core concepts of terms, expressions and features we interact with every day. The next few paragraphs explain these concepts, which can also be referred to in the terminology table.

Subscription is a term used to explain the purchase of a specific tier of features for a set amount of time. There are two factors that comprise a subscription:

  • SaaS or Self-Managed, which defines where the subscription is ‘applied’. GitLab Dedicated is considered as Self-Managed for the purposes of how it is applied.
  • The Tier, providing access to different features. This includes Premium or Ultimate.

A License is a legacy file that was previously required to activate a subscription on Self-Managed instances. Since GitLab 14.1, activations are now almost always handled by cloud activation codes, with a few exceptions:

  • Offline cloud licensing allows for cloud licensing in an offline environment. The customer must manually download and send periodic usage data via email. Requires at minimum GitLab 15.0.
  • For instances still on versions prior to GitLab 14.1, customers must work with their GitLab representative to request an exemption as part of the sales purchase or renewal process.
    • As noted on GitLab’s statement of support, our Support team are (in almost all circumstances) unable to assist customers running below GitLab 14.x, so this should provide further encouragement for customers to upgrade.
  • Post-sales exemptions for Cloud Licensing are rare and require an internal request and Sales VP approval.
  • License files are still used for Self-Managed Trials.

A Namespace is a top-level group where users can collaborate in subgroups and projects, and is considered a separate entity from other namespaces. SaaS customers purchase a subscription for a namespace, which means the namespace has access to their purchased tier of features, such as Premium or Ultimate. For example, company: “Example Corporation” has a namespace located at: gitlab.com/example-co:

  • All subgroups (gitlab.com/example-co/marketing) and projects (gitlab.com/example-co/development/webapp) created under this path have access to the paid features of the subscription.
  • A separate namespace, also used by the company, gitlab.com/example-net is not included in the subscription, and has no access to paid features.

A Web Direct customer has purchased a subscription or product directly, via GitLab.com and/or customers.gitlab.com. A Sales-assisted customer has been assisted by Sales via Salesforce to purchase the subscription or product, and is common in Enterprise organisations where a contract is involved.

Cloud Licensing (also known as Cloud Activation, Cloud License) is the now-default and preferred method to activate a subscription for Self-Managed instances. A Cloud License is a 24-digit alphanumeric code that customers apply to their Self-Managed instance. Some benefits of a Cloud License:

  • No need to re-apply a license file every year
  • Allows for the ability to use Quarterly Subscription Reconciliation (QSR) to reconcile Users over Subscription

Quarterly Subscription Reconciliation (QSR) is a method to reconcile any additional usage over the subscription agreement, such as when there are Users over Subscription. When enabled, QSR is performed each quarter (every three months) and generates an invoice if seat usage has increased over the current maximum.

Add-ons

The L&R team handles a lot of different types of purchases, and also assists with troubleshooting one-off or recurring add-ons. While GitLab Self-Managed predominantly consists of just a subscription purchase, GitLab.com provides a variety of add-ons for purchase including Compute Minutes and Storage and Transfer.

Compute Minutes

Formerly known as “CI/CD Minutes” or “Compute Credits”, Compute Minutes allow for usage of GitLab-managed Runners (Shared Runners) on GitLab.com (SaaS). Different tiers receive units as part of their subscription, which refresh every month:

  • Free (No Subscription): 400
  • Premium: 10,000
  • Ultimate: 50,000

Units are not a 1-to-1 translation of minutes and are subject to cost factors, including the type of Runner being used in a pipeline. A customer can purchase additional units at any time.

Storage and Transfer

On GitLab.com (SaaS), project storage limits, are enforced. The default storage limit is 10 GB per project. Once a project reaches its storage limit, it is considered as having excess storage usage and may enter into a read-only state until additional storage is purchased. Additional storage can be purchased at any time.

Changes to how storage and transfer limits are considered at a namespace level are planned, but not currently enforced. See the storage management improvements issue and Pricing FAQ for further information.

What you’ll be working on

  • Tickets in the L&R queue (see Zendesk Global Views for more information on locating these) in Zendesk. The queue will contain tickets from customers as well as from GitLab Team Members (Sales, CSMs, etc.). The tickets from team members are called “internal requests,” and information about those is available on the working internal requests workflow page.
  • Creating and/or updating marketing pages, product documentation and the GitLab Handbook and workflows around subscriptions, licensing and renewal-related topics.
  • Identifying product issues that are important to customers, Support or both, and coordinating with the entire L&R Support Team and the Fulfillment Product Management Team to prioritize them for Engineering.

Systems you’ll need access to

To be effective with this work, you’ll need access to systems and tools which you might not otherwise encounter working other Support problem types. This list supplements the baseline entitlements for the Support Engineer job family.

CustomersDot

CustomersDot is the common name for the web application built by GitLab and found at https://customers.gitlab.com. All license and subscription management is conducted on this site. You will need access to this to generate, forward and modify customer license and subscription information. When submitting an access request (AR) for CustomersDot, use this information:

  • System name:

    CustomersDot - admin

  • Justification for this access:

    L&R Support Engineers need CustomersDot admin access to work on customer licensing and subscriptions issues and to debug issues on the application itself.

Salesforce

A Salesforce.com (SFDC) account makes collaboration with Sales team members more efficient, primarily because you’ll be able to receive notifications when you’re tagged in a Chatter message (see the working with Sales workflow).

When creating an individual/bulk access request, use the following information:

  • System name:
    • If you are a US citizen:

      SalesForce, Role: Executive - No View All, Profile: Read Only GitLab, with US public sector record visibility

    • If you are not a US citizen:

      SalesForce, Role: Executive - No View All, Profile: Read Only GitLab

  • Justification for this access:

    L&R Support Engineers need their own Salesforce accounts to better collaborate with Sales team members as they work on customer licensing issues.

Slack

Discussion of Licensing & Renewals tickets and customer issues occurs in the #support_licensing-subscription channel in Slack. This ensures:

  • L&R team members will have one channel in which to collaborate
  • Increased visibility in queries and shared knowledge
  • Increased cohesion in the L&R team regardless of region

At the commencement of the APAC region’s Support Hours (23:00 UTC) there is a Daily Stand-up Bot for Licensing and Renewals in APAC post which tags all Support Engineers who have some responsibility for L&R tickets. This thread notifies the team of who is away for the current week, and allows team members to provide updates to each other about when they’re working on the queue. This helps ensure coverage reliability of the L&R tickets across the APAC region’s support hours.

Zuora

Zuora is considered the single source of truth or system of record for many subscription and renewal-related items, such as product SKUs, subscriptions and invoices. See the Transition to Zuora as the SSOT issue for more information.

Having access to Zuora will help with troubleshooting in situations where a customer’s CustomersDot and Salesforce records present conflicting or confusing information.

When creating an individual/bulk access request, use the following information:

  • System name:

    Zuora READ-ONLY access

  • Justification for this access:

    L&R Support Engineers need read-only Zuora access to troubleshoot Licensing and Renewal customer issues and support requests.

Workflows

Useful tools

Teams you’ll be working with

Product

As you work through the queue and on issues, if you spot something in the Fulfillment backlog that would makes things better for customers and Support, please label it with Support Interest::Categorize. See Support’s issue list for Fulfillment for more information.

Fulfillment stage

The Fulfillment Stage manages Purchasing and Provisioning, CustomersDot Usage, and Subscription Management. These teams own responsibilities that align with the types of requests we generally see in the queue.

#s_fulfillment channel in Slack

Growth stage

When we look at the product Growth stage, we can see that the team owns responsibilities that align with some of the types of requests we generally see in the queue, in particular the Conversion group.

What is not in the scope of L&R work in Support?

The queue should not be used for the following:

Product documentation

Marketing pages

Handbook pages

Issue trackers

Issue tracker Use Case
GitLab Issue Tracker Issues related to self-managed or GitLab.com functionality or backend processing
CustomersDot Issues caused specifically by something within CustomersDot or affecting self-managed license generation, generated licenses
AMER Licensing & Renewals Team
Information specific to the AMER region's Licensing & Renewals Support Team
Licensing & Renewals Glossary of Terms
A list of terms used in the Licensing and Renewals workflow
Licensing & Renewals Workflows
Last modified April 9, 2024: Remove license_decoder recommendation (0bc228eb)
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