Statement of Support

1. You are here:
2. Support
3. Statement of Support

The GitLab support team is here to help. This document defines what we support in terms of our products, services, and applications. Part of providing effective support is defining what is outside of the scope of support.

Scope of support, in the simplest terms, is what we support and what we do not. Ideally, we would support everything. However, without reducing the quality of our support or increasing the price of our products this would be impossible. These "limitations" help us to create a more consistent and efficient support experience.

Please understand that any support that might be offered beyond the scope defined here is done at the discretion of the agent or engineer and is provided as a courtesy.

On This Page

• Self-managed
  • Starter, Premium, and Ultimate Users
    • We support the current major version and the two previous major versions
    • First-time installation and new features
  • Core and Community Edition Users
  • Out of Scope
    • Gitaly and NFS
• GitLab.com
  • Bronze, Silver, and Gold Users
  • Free Plan Users
    • GitLab.com Availability for Free Users
    • Support for Free Plan Users
  • Out of Scope
• Out of Scope for All Tiers

Self-managed

Starter, Premium, and Ultimate Users

We will help troubleshoot all components bundled with GitLab Omnibus when used as a packaged part of a GitLab installation. Any assistance with modifications to GitLab, including new functionality, bug-fixes, issues with alpha features or other code changes should go through the GitLab issue tracker, triage, and release cycle. Support is not offered for local modifications to GitLab source code.

Your Support Contract will cover support for Beta features. We will automatically triage tickets for Beta features with the lowest priority available.

We understand that GitLab is often used in complex environments in combination with a variety of tools. We'll do best-effort support in debugging components that work alongside GitLab.

If you obtained an Ultimate license as part of GitLab's Open Source or Education programs, Support (as included with Starter, Premium or Ultimate licenses) is not included unless purchased separately. Please see the GitLab OSS License/Subscription Details for additional details.

We support the current major version and the two previous major versions

Unless otherwise specified in your support contract, we support the current major version and previous two major versions only. For example, as 13.x is the current major version, GitLab installations running versions in the 13.x, 12.x and 11.x series are eligible for support.

GitLab only backports fixes, not features and that too on a limited number of prior releases. For more details please visit the maintenance policy.

If you contact support about issues you're experiencing while on an unsupported version, we'll link to this section of the Statement of Support and invite you to upgrade. If you encounter any issues in the course of upgrading to a supported version, please open a new ticket.

First-time installation and new features

For assistance with first-time installations and configuration of new features, we highly recommend using our comprehensive documentation:

• First-time installation step by step guide
• Updating your GitLab instance
• High availability
• Kubernetes clusters

Alternatively, you can reach out to our Professional Services team via the following page. Our Professional Services team provides training and assistance with design and implementation of new features and installations.

In case you are facing challenges after attempting an installation of a new deployment or implementing new features, a support ticket can be opened using our support portal.

Core and Community Edition Users

If you are seeking help with your GitLab Core or Community Edition installation, note that the GitLab Support Team is unable to directly assist with issues with specific installations of these versions. Please use the following resources instead:

• GitLab Documentation: Extensive documentation regarding the possible configurations of GitLab.
• GitLab Community Forum: This is the best place to have a discussion about your Community Edition configuration and options.
• Stack Overflow: Please search for similar issues before posting your own, as there's a good chance somebody else had the same issue as you and has already found a solution.

Our community advocates also spend time on the Community Forum and Stack Overflow to help where they can, and escalate issues as needed.

Out of Scope

The following details what is outside of the scope of support for self-managed instances with a license.

Gitaly and NFS

From GitLab 14.0, enhancements and bug fixes for NFS for Git repositories will no longer be considered and customer technical support will be considered out of scope. Technical support for deployments of GitLab version 13.x and earlier is unchanged, constrained only by which versions of GitLab are eligible for support, and GitLab's maintenance poiicy.

As more customers started deploying larger GitLab environments and needing to scale out Gitaly, we learned that NFS was unsuitable for storing git data. It does not perform well with a workload that consists of lots of small files, like git repositories. Under heavy load, NFS features that are designed to improve performance (such as caching) were found to result in different Gitaly servers returning different data for the same git repository. This can result in intermittent inconsistency issues for read requests, and for write requests, we also suspect this as the root cause of some data loss issues.

GitLab developed Gitaly Cluster specifically to meet the needs of scaled-out deployments of GitLab, and customers should upgrade to Gitaly Cluster as soon as possible. For single node installations of GitLab Omnibus or single node Gitaly deployments, use block storage instead of NFS.

We will continue to help with git related tickets from customers running one or more Gitaly server with its data stored on NFS. Examples include:

• Performance issues or timeouts accessing Git data
• Commits or branches vanish.
• GitLab intermittently returns the wrong git data (such as reporting that a repository has no branches).

Assistance will be limited to activities like:

• Verifying developers' workflow uses features like protected branches.
• Reviewing GitLab event data from the database to advise if it looks like a force push over-wrote branches.
• Verifying that NFS client mount options prioritise data integrity over performance, and that certain caching options are set correctly (such as lookupcache=positive)
• Analysing the GitLab Workhorse and Rails logs, and determining that 500 errors being seen in the environment are caused by slow responses from Gitaly.

GitLab support will be unable to progress the investigation further if:

• The GitLab deployment is v14 or above, and
• The only remaining avenue for investigation is to look at Gitaly logs off all the servers sharing the same NFS mount point.

If the issue is reproducable, or if it happens intermittently but regularly, GitLab Support will investigate providing the issue reproduces without the use of NFS. The affected respositories need to be migrated to a different Gitaly shard, such as Gitaly cluster or a standalone Gitaly VM, backed up by block storage.

GitLab.com

Bronze, Silver, and Gold Users

GitLab.com has a full team of Site Reliability Engineers and Production Engineers monitoring its status 24/7. This means that often, by the time you notice something is amiss, there's someone already looking into it.

We recommend that all GitLab.com customers follow @gitlabstatus on Twitter and use our status page to keep informed of any incidents.

If you obtained a Gold subscription as part of GitLab's Open Source or Education programs, support is not included unless purchased separately. Please see the GitLab OSS License/Subscription Details for additional details.

Free Plan Users

Technical and general support for those using our free options is “Community First”. Like many other free SaaS products, users are first directed to find support in community sources such as the following:

• GitLab Documentation: Extensive documentation on anything and everything GitLab.
• GitLab Community Forum: Get help directly from the community. When able, GitLab employees also participate and assist in answering questions.
• Stack Overflow: Please search for similar issues before posting your own, as there's a good chance somebody else had the same issue as you and has already found a solution.

GitLab.com Availability for Free Users

You should follow @gitlabstatus on Twitter for status updates on GitLab.com, or check our status page to see if there is a known service outage and follow the linked issue for more detailed updates.

Support for Free Plan Users

The GitLab.com support team does offer support for

• broken states for specific users or repositories (for example "I get a 500 every time I log in, my friend doesn't.")
• requests related to an email you received related to a security or production incident.

For help with these issues please open a support request. For free GitLab.com users seeking support, a support agent or engineer may determine that the request is more appropriate for community forums or the issue tracker than for the official GitLab Support Team.

Note that issues affecting paid users receive a higher priority. There are no guaranteed response times associated with free accounts.

Out of Scope

The following details what is outside of the scope of support for GitLab.com customers with a subscription.

Out of Scope for All Tiers

The following are outside of the scope of support for both users of Self-managed GitLab and GitLab.com with or without a license or subscription.

General

1. Training: Support is unable to provide training on the use of the underlying technologies that GitLab relies upon. GitLab is a product aimed at technical users, and Support expects our users and customers be versed in the basic usage of the technologies related to features that they're seeking support for. For example, a customer looking for help with a Kubernetes integration should understand Kubernetes to the extent that they could retrieve log files or perform other basic tasks without in-depth instruction.

Git

1. git specific commands and issues (not related to GitLab)

CI/CD

1. Helping debug specific commands or scripts in a .gitlab-ci.yml
2. Issues other than configuration or setup of private runner hosts

Note: If you would like help with a GitLab CI/CD feature, we recommend creating a test branch with a minimal .gitlab-ci.yml that illustrates the problem. In most cases this will enable our team help you more quickly than trying to debug a complex pipeline described by a large .gitlab-ci.yml file.