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GitLab

Incident Management

GitLab offers solutions for handling incidents in your applications and services, such as setting up Prometheus alerts, displaying metrics, and sending notifications.

Configure incidents (ULTIMATE)

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 11.11.

You can enable or disable Incident Management features in the GitLab user interface to create issues when alerts are triggered:

  1. Navigate to {settings} Settings > Operations > Incidents and expand Incidents:

    Incident Management Settings

  2. For GitLab versions 11.11 and greater, you can select the Create an issue checkbox to create an issue based on your own issue templates. For more information, see Taking Action on Incidents (ULTIMATE).

  3. To create issues from alerts, select the template in the Issue Template select box.

  4. To send separate email notifications to users with Developer permissions, select Send a separate email notification to Developers.

  5. Click Save changes.

Appropriately configured alerts include an embedded chart for the query corresponding to the alert. You can also configure GitLab to close issues when you receive notification that the alert is resolved.

Notify developers of alerts

GitLab can react to the alerts triggered from your applications and services by creating issues and alerting developers through email. By default, GitLab sends these emails to owners and maintainers of the project. These emails contain details of the alert, and a link for more information.

To send separate email notifications to users with Developer permissions, see Configure incidents.

Configure Prometheus alerts

You can set up Prometheus alerts in:

Prometheus alerts are created by the special Alert Bot user. You can't remove this user, but it does not count toward your license limit.

Configure external generic alerts

GitLab can accept alerts from any source through a generic webhook receiver. When configuring the generic alerts integration, GitLab creates a unique endpoint which receives a JSON-formatted, customizable payload.

Embed metrics in incidents and issues

You can embed metrics anywhere GitLab Markdown is used, such as descriptions, comments on issues, and merge requests. Embedding metrics helps you share them when discussing incidents or performance issues. You can output the dashboard directly into any issue, merge request, epic, or any other Markdown text field in GitLab by copying and pasting the link to the metrics dashboard.

You can embed both GitLab-hosted metrics and Grafana metrics in incidents and issue templates.

Context menu

You can view more details about an embedded metrics panel from the context menu. To access the context menu, click the {ellipsis_v} More actions dropdown box above the upper right corner of the panel. The options are:

View logs from metrics panel

Viewing logs from a metrics panel can be useful if you're triaging an application incident and need to explore logs from across your application. These logs help you understand what is affecting your application's performance and resolve any problems.

Integrate incidents with Slack

Slack slash commands allow you to control GitLab and view GitLab content without leaving Slack.

Learn how to set up Slack slash commands and how to use the available slash commands.

Integrate issues with Zoom

GitLab enables you to associate a Zoom meeting with an issue for synchronous communication during incident management. After starting a Zoom call for an incident, you can associate the conference call with an issue. Your team members can join the Zoom call without requesting a link.