At times the Support team will be asked to send notices to GitLab SaaS users or customers to inform them of actions that we have taken (or will be taking) on namespaces or projects under their control.
This workflow describes how to fulfill different types of contact requests and the helpful tools you can use in the process.
Number of users | Which thing to use | Approvals required | Notifications required |
---|---|---|---|
1-2 | Manually create a Zendesk ticket | None | None |
3+ | Mass Emails through Marketing Department | Director | Support Readiness issue + FAQ |
confidential_incident_data
issue template in production issue tracker. These must be fulfilled by CMOC during the shift.Contact Request
template. These can be performed by anyone with Admin access to GitLab.com. CMOC participation is not obligatory.Most notices should be sent in the form of Zendesk tickets. Always send these tickets to users with Owner
level permissions in the namespace or project in question.
Most contact requests will involve contacting all of the owners of only one project or only a few specific users. If you're tasked with contacting the owners of a project and know that there's only one, feel free to look up their email address using your admin account or ChatOps.
However, some contact requests may involve contacting all of the owners of multiple projects. Support Engineers should direct requests for reaching out to multiple owners across multiple projects to do Mass Emails through Marketing Department
Make sure to add an admin note on a user/group we took action on. This will ensure that we can track a block/change reason if a user reaches out to us using a different channel.
For the process of sending the outbound contact requests in Zendesk, please review the Support Readiness documentation for more information.
The Customer Ticket Generator is a form that can be used to send multiple tickets out at once. Once the form is submitted, an issue will be created in the customer ticket generator tracker where a member of SupportOps will then run it. This can also be used in conjunction with the Email Grab Script, whose output can be provided as the CSV for the form.
The limit of 500 tickets is defined in order not to hit API rate limits on Zendesk side.
Outside of Zendesk we may be asked to be involved in the process of sending mass notices to users. For larger email campaigns, involve the marketing team:
request-email
template. You may also need to create a supplementary issue using request-confirm-target-list template.Note that this process requires a number of approvals from the management, so plan ahead and make sure that the issue is completely ready for review at least one week before sending out emails.
The following tools can be used to facilitate different types of contact requests.
The Email Grab Script is a Ruby script that will return the primary email addresses of the owners of a group or project. Currently, it can only be used if you possess a GitLab SaaS admin account. It can also be supplied only a list of usernames, in which case it will return the primary email addresses of those users. To use it:
gem install labclient
.emailgrab.rb
.YourSuperSweetPAT
with a read_api
scoped PAT from your GitLab SaaS admin account.
groups
, users
, or projects
.ruby emailgrab.rb
.The results will be created as namespace-contacts.csv
in the same directory that the script is located in.