
GitLab 8.16 Released with auto deploy on GKE and Prometheus monitoring - Smibu
https://about.gitlab.com/2017/01/22/gitlab-8-16-released/
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markdog12
Using Gitlab at our company and I love it. I could never agree with the "small
teams don't need/want time tracking" argument, so I'm very happy to see they
released it for CE.

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KuhlMensch
I am a bit unsure what Gitlab consider a small team. But I find myself getting
a little exasperated when they choose to keep features from CE because "small
teams don't need it". Last week I found this was the reason they did not
include global contributer statistics in CE. This would be a trivial change,
and an important one for my team of ~14 engineers with in-house tools and a
microservice architecture who would like to see the pulse of development.

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sytse
There are no features that are never needed by a small team. To make our
business model work we do need to make some features exclusive to EE. The
definition we use is: is this feature more relevant for organizations that
have more than 100 potential users? We thought this was the case for
timetracking but we were wrong and reversed the decision.

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jjawssd
Gitlab is a true inspiration to me. I hope they continue onwards with good
luck and fortune!

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sytse
Thanks for your kind wishes, have a great Sunday.

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why-el
I am curious why you'd need to run monitoring on your own instances, since the
assumption is that given a set of resources (say X RAM and Y CPU), you can
support Z users. At least I remember they advertised such a number.

Now, if they somehow get to have these monitoring numbers automatically sent
back to a centralized server where they can gather more insights about various
installations, that would be killer, but I am not sure about the feasibility,
giving the privacy implications (although plenty of open source software does
it).

~~~
sytse
> I am curious why you'd need to run monitoring on your own instances, since
> the assumption is that given a set of resources (say X RAM and Y CPU), you
> can support Z users. At least I remember they advertised such a number.

We indeed publish a list of requirements
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html)

But this is not enough. Not all hardware is created equal (one core is faster
than another) and not all users are created equal (one might push many more
branches per day). So to help people with the performance of their GitLab
server we think the integrated metrics will be a large benefit.

But another important reason to add this is to ensure that GitLab has metrics
about applications that are deployed with GitLab.

> Now, if they somehow get to have these monitoring numbers automatically sent
> back to a centralized server where they can gather more insights about
> various installations, that would be killer, but I am not sure about the
> feasibility, giving the privacy implications (although plenty of open source
> software does it).

We're very conscious of the privacy implications of sending data about GitLab
usage back. We're doing that not with Prometheus but with a usage ping in
GitLab EE. We're working on bringing that usage ping to CE, for our reasoning
see [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/merge_requests/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/merge_requests/4428)

BTW People can use Prometheus monitoring in three forms: on-premise
centralized, on-premises federated, and as a SaaS

On-premises centralized is what we just shipped.

Prometheus is easy to federate, where some of the metrics of a server are
included in another one. In the future we might give every deployed
application its own Prometheus server in a pod.

If you want to use Prometheus as a SaaS we recommend Weaveworks
[https://www.weave.works/solution/prometheus-
monitoring/](https://www.weave.works/solution/prometheus-monitoring/)

~~~
why-el
Great, thank you for the detailed answer. We use and love Gitlab. ;)

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wldcordeiro
I really love Gitlab but there's this one thing that's been niggling me about
Gitlab.com and it's that every time the app is updated my sessions are
invalidated and I need to go through 2FA login all over again.

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sashk
Are you on Chrome by any chance? I have exactly same behaviour, which I can't
track down.

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drdaeman
I haven't gave it much thought, but I'm on Firefox, and my session is
sometimes lost (maybe once or twice per month), asking me to re-login...

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wldcordeiro
Same. I'm on Firefox as well and it seems to occur once a month or so.

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btashton
Ah finally the disk usage breakdown. As someone who pays for Gitlab hoisting
this is a huge deal. We see our usage number climb until the instance becomes
unresponsive and no way to find where the growth is. Thank you!

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sytse
You're very welcome. By the way, what do you mean with 'pays for GitLab
hosting'?

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btashton
Githost.io

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sytse
That makes sense, thanks!

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sandGorgon
Also includes Mattermost in this release. Sweet!

 _> This release migrates project related statistics to a separate table,
removing existing columns in the process. This migration process requires
downtime, and can take 10-15 minutes for large installations._

Any place i can eyeball this upgrade script first?

Incidentally, Im curious to know (to try and learn) how do you guys test this
kind of stuff? do you have lots of different databases saved over that you try
this kind of a major db upgrade on?

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rabbitfang48
It looks like [0] & [1] are the relevant DB migration scripts. GitLab.com is
used to test new release candidate versions in a production environment before
it is shipped. I'm guessing the 10-15 minute number came from how long it took
them to run it on their systems. They do have staging environments where they
run migrations (and test new code) on stale prod data as well.

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/db/migra...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/db/migrate/20161201155511_create_project_statistics.rb)

[1]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/db/migra...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/db/migrate/20161201160452_migrate_project_statistics.rb)

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mrmondo
Another smooth upgrade minus one bug with people on chrome trying to approve
and accept merge requests (I've logged ee bug #1575 for this).

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sytse
Sam, thanks for filing [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/1575](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1575) I've
pinged our frontend team.

~~~
mrmondo
No worries, hope my report was good enough! Excellent support as always :)

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sytse
Thanks for helping to troubleshoot in the issue. Our frontend lead and VP of
Engineering are on it.

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mrmondo
And they swarmed the issue and found the issue (within the nginx config) very
odd-ball one indeed that didn't affect everyone, fantastic troubleshooting by
all the Gitlab engineers, excellent communication and top-notch support like
I've never experienced from any software vendor before. A+++ would commit
again ;)

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bedros
I'm currently using redmine for my private project, anyone would recommend
using gitlab CE instead?

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vetinari
Depending what you need it for.

Redmine is still better from the project management planning and control POV
(i.e. issues can be in different queues, but still form a coherent hierarchy,
milestones consisting from issues and the control of time spent/still required
to finish them; the work needed can be not only programming, but also other
activities, etc.).

Gitlab is much nicer for the developers.

So for a private project, Gitlab might be a worth to try.

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gtirloni
Got it running on GKE but the mandatory password change didn't work (request
rejected).

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sytse
Mmm, that is strange, I don't have a clue why that would happen.

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gtirloni
It was a CSRF verification error. My wildcard subdomain didn't have a A entry
for itself. It's working now! Sorry for the false positive.

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sytse
No problem, glad to hear you got it running.

