Category Direction - Collection

🧺 Collection
🔭 Collection Vision
🚀 What's next & why

🧺 Collection

Please reach out to Tim Hey, Interim Product Manager for Telemetry (E-Mail if you'd like to provide feedback or ask questions about what's coming).

🔭 Collection Vision

Data is becoming more and more important for building products. Unfortunately, it's tricky to implement usage tracking, and often requires either complex and confusing code/integrations, or expensive, proprietary tools (or both).

Everyone should be able to easily track how their users are using their product whether they are a small team working on an Android app or a vast, enterprise company.

When thinking about telemetry collection, we are guided by a few North Stars:

⭐️ Transparency in Collection: Compliance and privacy are critical considerations with any telemetry effort. We should establish clear responsibilities for collecting data in a way that is transparent, compliant and respectful of our user's right to privacy. All of these processes and decisions will be clearly and publically documented.
⭐️ Efficiency of Collection: A large part of the challenge with our historical usage ping was the inability for contributors to GitLab to know how and when to use it. Our collection mechanisms will be beautifully documented, easy to use and simple to understand.
⭐️ Measurable Results from Collection: The true value of data is shown in what you can learn from it. We intend to create TaaS - Telemetry as a Service - to enable our users to get value out their own collected data, both from their own GitLab instances and also the applications that they build using GitLab.

🚀 What's next & why

🔥 Current focus

Priority	Focus	Why?
1️⃣	Define and measure monthly active users, overall and per-stage	After this epic is closed, we should have an internally consistent view of MAU and SMAU across GitLab.com and self-managed. We should be able to measure active use in a Periscope dashboard, enabling us to improve MAU and SMAU. We can then tackle improving this further with SMAU/MAU v2.0.

🎉 Next up

Priority	Focus	Why?
2️⃣	SMAU/MAU v2.0.	As our organization grows, we require better data to inform our product, marketing, and sales team as they make decisions to grow the business and realize our strategic goals. This epic will serve as the aggregation of issues required to improve our monthly active user metrics, so we can have a world-class data platform at GitLab.
3️⃣	Improve telemetry data collection from self-managed instances	Currently we have little to no visibility into how many of our largest and most valuable customers are using GitLab. We need to understand how we can collect data more consistently from our Self-Managed users in order to better serve them.
4️⃣	Telemetry Documentation	It is important that as we roll out new changes and develop processes and workflows, we clearly and transparently document everything in a way that is easily discoverable and digestible by both GitLab team members and users/customers.

A brief history of Usage Ping

Historically, GitLab has utilized a primitive and limited product usage tracking system (developed in-house) called usage ping. This consists primarily of counts, e.g. how many pipelines, issues, projects, etc. that a user has in their instance/group. A snapshot of this data is sent once a week to GitLab's Version application (which is also managed by Fulfillment), this ping also includes a version check to understand what version of GitLab is currently implemented. Further Documentation on usage ping.

The above is where we are today, but we need to move towards becoming a more data-informed Product organization at GitLab which requires a much more robust system for product usage data collection.