[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":792},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/lm-sre-shadow":3,"navigation-en-us":37,"banner-en-us":437,"footer-en-us":447,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Laura Montemayor":687,"blog-related-posts-en-us-lm-sre-shadow":701,"assessment-promotions-en-us":743,"next-steps-en-us":782},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":25,"isFeatured":12,"meta":26,"navigation":27,"path":28,"publishedDate":20,"seo":29,"stem":33,"tagSlugs":34,"__hash__":36},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/lm-sre-shadow.yml","Lm Sre Shadow",[7],"laura-montemayor",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"lm-sre-shadow",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"Shadowing a Site Reliability Engineer","On-call through the eyes of a software engineer. Read Laura's week shadowing a Site Reliability Engineer",[18],"Laura Montemayor","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679120/Blog/Hero%20Images/sre-shadow-week.jpg","2020-04-13","\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n## A day in the life of a SRE at GitLab with Laura Montemayor\n\nHi! I’m [Laura Montemayor](https://gitlab.com/laura.Mon), a Frontend Engineer in GitLab’s [Monitor:Health Group](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/monitoring/). Monitor is one the [DevOps lifecycle stages](https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/) that comes after you’ve configured your production infrastructure and have deployed your application to it. We work on features that help you monitor metrics and Kubernetes, track errors, manage incidents, and more.\n\n_If you’re curious about our team, you can check out our [direction page](/direction/analytics/) to see what’s on the roadmap._\n\nA few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to  shadow our SREs, which was pretty exciting\nfor me, as it is monitoring in action.  An SRE is a **Site Reliability Engineer**,\nwho is responsible for keeping all user-facing services and other GitLab production\nsystems running smoothly.\n\n_You can learn all about them in [our\nhandbook](https://handbook.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/infrastructure/site-reliability-engineer/)._\n\n**Here are some of my general takeaways from that week:**\n\n#### Less is more when it comes to tooling\nI’ve had non-remote friends ask me what communications tools we use at GitLab, and\nthey are sometimes surprised that it’s not a long list. In a way, I had the same\nexpectation for our SREs and their tooling; I had visions of them all buried underneath monitors, with screens showing moving graphs, stats, logs - the works!. But SREs use\nthe same tools everyone at GitLab uses for communication - GitLab issues, Slack and\nZoom. The workflow is pretty straightforward; the on-call SRE gets pinged on\nPagerDuty, which also sends an alert to a Slack channel, and everything is discussed\neither there or in an issue. True to our [transparency](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency) value,\neveryone at GitLab has access to the channels and the issues, and most of these issues are public.\n\n_If you are interested in learning more about SREs and the tooling they use (and\nmore!), check out my [teammate’s blog\npost.](/blog/sre-shadow/)_\n\n![sre alert flow](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/sre-alert-flow.png)\n_MT = Monitoring Tool_\n\n#### Managing the level of noise is a huge challenge\nDuring the time I shadowed, I probably saw an alert every 5 or so minutes.\nAnd this was during their so called “quiet time”! At first, it seems overwhelming to be alerted so often,\nand everything looked serious and actionable to me. _Queue latency outside of SLO?\nFilesystem will be full SOON?_ I panicked. However, a lot of these alerts are warnings\nand don’t all turn into incidents; but even if they are warnings, sometimes they\nmerit some investigation and discussion, since almost no alert can be truly ignored.\n\n##### Examples of alerts that can usually be ignored:\n1. **CPU/Memory usage that just stepped over 90%** - This can be ignored (but an eye\nshould be kept on it) because the prediction algorithms for usage often raise an\nalert prematurely. The usage normally falls to safe levels or won’t cause an issue\nfor a few more SRE shifts.\n2. **Abuse detection** - This can give a lot of false positives which are not\nnecessarily an incident, like abuse being detected when a project’s pipeline is used\nexcessively.\n\n#### Incidents don’t happen as often as I thought\nSo even though there are a lot of alerts, I was surprised to find the majority of them don’t actually turn into incidents. There was a part of me who wanted to experience an incident, since I\nthought going into a situation room and resolving it would be really exciting. But\nthere were only two incidents, and one of them was resolved straight away and the\nother one was handed over for further investigation. None of them were disruptive to\ncustomers though, so all in all, I figure GitLab must be pretty stable 💪\n\n#### Monitoring is hard (no surprise there!)\nExperience and domain knowledge certainly help when it comes to sifting through the\nnoise, but it doesn’t make it easy.  A lot of alerts happen because they are often\nbased on inflexible Boolean logic or some arbitrary threshold.\nFor example: we got an alert for a spike in the redis-cache latency Apdex. We\nchecked the Grafana dashboard and realized it was a one off spike in latency, so it\nwas fine for the time being. But it was one more thing to keep an eye out for, and\nthe intermittent spiking kept alerting us, which added more cognitive noise. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of trying to effectively monitor with a bunch of different tools. This  is why I love\nthe idea of a single app for all your needs 😉\n\n#### Communication is key\nOne thing that helps immensely with monitoring and incident management is\ncommunication. It is one of our [core values](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#collaboration) at GitLab after all, seeing as we are an\nall-remote, async team. If the SRE who is on-call cannot resolve the issue straight\naway, they can just ping other SREs on Slack and someone will be available to help.\nIt’s the advantage of being an async team - there’s always someone available in\nalmost every single timezone! It also means that even if you’re not on the SRE team\nand you’re working on something that will start firing off alerts, you should\ncommunicate with the SREs to let them know. For example: some changes were made in\nthe Pages API, which were rolled out to 20% of the domains. This caused an increase\nin alerts, but since it was properly communicated, the SRE on call could be assured\nthat these alerts were fine to ignore. There was no way of turning these alerts off\nunfortunately, since the rigidity of the tools doesn’t allow it.\n\n[Here’s the issue](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/production/-/issues/1734), if you’re curious.\n\n#### We love issues 🧡\nAt GitLab, we love writing everything down in issues, which helps a lot with incident\nmanagement. Every time an SRE changes shifts, they write a handover issue with a\nsummary of what alerts/incidents are ongoing or resolved, etc. Check out [this\nexample](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/on-call-handovers/-/issues/413).\nEvery time an alert actually becomes an incident, the first step is always to\nresolve it, since it affects our customers. After that, an issue is created to\ncollaboratively do a root cause analysis and hopefully prevent it from happening\nagain. Keeping record of all of the incidents is really helpful for context and\nresolution of future incidents.\n\n#### There must be collaboration\nOur SREs who are on-call do not work in isolation, and even though they are the first\npoint of contact for alerts, it’s not expected that they solve everything themselves.\nSometimes things can’t be solved in the moment, like the example below.\n\n**Incident:** AlertManager is failing to send notifications\n**Why weren’t we able to resolve it?** We don’t have visibility when Alertmanager doesn’t\nwork, as we don’t have logs or graphs to for it.\n**So what now?** We first checked to see if there was a similar or a linked issue, and\nthere was. After that, we made an issue for it, linked the other issue, assigned a\ndomain expert, and went from there.\n\n[Here’s the issue.](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/production/-/issues/1707)\n\n#### Monitoring is a growing field\nGiven the imperfect nature of monitoring, it’s only natural that the field is\nconstantly evolving and growing. At GitLab, we recently created a [Scalability team](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/team/scalability/),\nwhich will help curate our monitoring and alerting. They will frequently update the\ncriteria to generate alerts, which will make the whole process more manageable. My\nteam is responsible for building the features to help monitor and manage incidents,\nand we’re currently working on features which will help with our SREs workflow. If\nyou’re interested, check out our [Ops Section Product Vision](/direction/ops/) for more details. You can also check out the [reliability guide](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/team/) for\na more in-depth and robust look at what our SREs do.\n\n[Join us](/jobs/) at GitLab! 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Program.",[707],"Jacie Bandur","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749664102/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-values-cover.png","2021-05-18","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\nHi! I’m Jacie Bandur. I completed GitLab’s CEO Shadow program from 2021-04-26 through 2021-05-07. It was a really enlightening experience. I generally work in Learning and Development and consider myself a lifelong learner. I can’t even explain how much I learned in such a short about of time. I learned a lot about the business. I learned a lot about the product. But learned even more about the importance of iteration in everything we do.\n\n### Qualifications to Participate\n\nI wanted to start this off with touching on qualifications to participate in the program.\n\nI am the type of person that has gone through most of my life thinking I’m not qualified for things. I’m not qualified for that job, that promotion, that program. The list goes on and on.\n\nWhen I saw the [CEO Shadow program](/blog/ceo-shadow-impressions-takeaways/) kick off in 2019, I really wanted to participate. I was a little intimidated. Who wouldn’t be, spending 2 weeks with the CEO of any company? But time passed and all the sudden it was 2021 and I had not taken any steps to participating in the program.\n\nIf you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you that you are qualified to participate in this program, I’m not big on giving “pep talks,” but here’s me telling you - You are qualified for this program. There’s never going to be a good or perfect time to do it. Tell your manager you want to do the CEO Shadow program. Stop waiting. Sign up today.\n\nNote: Take a look at the [eligibility](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/#eligibility) section of the CEO Shadow page for more information on signing up.\n\n### Pre-Program Tips\n\nThere are many things recommended for shadows to do pre-program outlined on the CEO Shadow handbook page. As I was going through the program there were things that I thought helped me (or would have helped me).\n\nHere are my top 6 recommendations:\n\n1. Make sure your team knows you will be unavailable for 2 weeks. This isn’t a program that can or should be done alongside your normal day to day work. I found catching up from the 2 weeks away kind of difficult because I was trying to keep up on what was going on and I had a bunch of half done things.\n1. Talk with people who have done the shadow program - schedule at least 3 coffee chats with CEO Shadow Alumni.\n1. Have food that is easy to eat quickly. Sid’s meetings are back to back most days, so you will have small amounts of time to eat throughout the day. Sid does eat during calls, which you are welcome to do, too, but if you are taking notes, it is difficult to eat. And this will make you realize why speedy meetings are so important!\n1. Listen to the [Executive Leadership LinkedIn Learning course](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/executive-leadership/).\n1. Be prepared to ask questions. When doing the program virtually, there isn’t a ton of time for asking questions, so when one would come up, I would add it to a note on my computer and ask if there was ever time with just the shadows and Sid.\n1. Take at least 1 day off after the program. Take even a couple of days off if you can! This is recommended on the handbook page, but I can’t stress this enough.\n\n\n### Takeaways\n\n**Group Conversations**\n\nI’ve been at GitLab for almost 4 years. When I joined, I made it a point to attend as many GC’s as I could. I had gotten out of the habit of attending Group Conversations. After attending them again for 2 weeks, I realized how important they are to understand better what is going on across the business. Everything in the organization is so intertwined. It’s helpful to understand what other teams are working on and succeeding in.\n\n**Feedback**\n\nWe should all be giving and receiving feedback often. We have a whole [handbook page on giving and receiving feedback](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/guidance-on-feedback/). Read the handbook page and watch the videos, as well. Practice giving feedback. I recommend using the [1-1 agenda](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggested-agenda-format/) Sid uses, because Feedback is an essential piece of that agenda, and it makes feedback more of a routine thing.\n\n**Biggest Takeaway**\n\nWe have an incredible team here at GitLab, from Engineering to Product to Sales to People and all the groups in between. There are so many great ideas. I observed the constant reinforcement by Sid to start with something small and build on it. You can ALWAYS make something more complex. It’s hard to go back to something more simple when you start with something complex.\n\nA couple of quotes that I heard from Sid during the program that reinforced this point:\n\n- “Every complex system evolves from a simple system that worked.”\n- “It’s very clear what is the simple solution. We can always make it more complicated as we go on.”\n\nI know they are very similar, but they happened in different meetings on different days, so the point was reinforced repeatedly.\n\nDuring the program, I reflected on the projects that I’am working on. How many of them am I trying to do too much on before releasing. Probably all of them. When I’m working on projects in the future, I will break them down into smaller, more doable chunks. Iteration is hard - it’s a skill to be practicing constantly.\n\n\n### Overall\n\nOverall, the program was really insightful and impactful. If you haven’t participated in it yet, I cannot encourage you enough to do so!\n",{"slug":712,"featured":12,"template":13},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":714,"config":726},{"title":715,"description":716,"authors":717,"heroImage":719,"date":720,"body":721,"category":9,"tags":722},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[718],"Austin Regnery","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679501/Blog/Hero%20Images/new-feature.png","2021-05-11","It was mid-morning on a Tuesday in February, and I had 10 minutes in between meetings. So I decided to try and solve a pain point of mine.\nYou see, I had to memorize this HTML snippet to create a collapsible section in GitLab Issue descriptions and comments, but I kept forgetting it. Was it `summary` or `section`? I could never remember.\n```html\n\u003Cdetails>\n\u003Csummary>Insert Title\u003C/summary>\nHidden content\n\u003C/details>\n```\nEven though it is not vanilla Markdown, GitLab knows how to interpret some HTML. I used this formatting trick fairly often since full-page screenshots can occupy a lot of screen space, which leads to excessive scrolling.\nSo I decided to poke around our codebase to see how the other Markdown shortcuts worked. To my surprise, it was pretty straightforward. Each shortcut had a simple text input that mapped to each button. This implementation was simple to replicate since I just needed to copy/paste and replace a few words.\n![Image of Vue and Haml files with editor shortcuts](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/vue-haml.png){: .shadow}\nThe Vue and Haml files with the new shortcut\n\nI started a branch and began hacking away at the code. Now, I would never call myself a Software Engineer, but I like to try and make things from time to time. I was able to add a new shortcut to the toolbar to insert this code snippet for me in less than 10 minutes. No more memorizing! Making contributions like this is what makes working at GitLab so special.\nNow, it wasn't ready for production, but I at least had something that worked. I shared it with my UX colleagues in Slack, and it started to gain traction with several up-votes and few constructive comments on how to make it better.\nWith the functionality flushed out, a few other designers helped me get a better icon added to our SVG library. Using clear iconography is critical for communicating information more clearly.\n| Initial Icon | Final Icon |\n| - | - |\n| ![SVG of chevron right icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/chevron-right.svg) | ![SVG of details block icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/details-block.svg) |\n\nThe last thing to do was resolve my failing tests, and I had several teammates help me do that.\n![Gif of the shortcut being used](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/demo.gif)\n\nToday [this change](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/54938) merged! Now I solved a pain point for me and others. It took a few months to go from idea to production, but the effort was super low. I'd say the return on my initial investment, 10 minutes, is super high.\n> Having a direct impact on a product was never an option for me before joining GitLab.\n\n![Image of participants in the Merge Request](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/participants.png)\n\n\nThank you to everyone that helped me deploy this\n",[723,724,725],"UX","product","AWS",{"slug":727,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",{"content":729,"config":741},{"title":730,"description":731,"authors":732,"heroImage":734,"date":720,"body":735,"category":9,"tags":736},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[733],"Sam Beckham","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679507/Blog/Hero%20Images/ci-cd.png","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nHave you ever pressed the close door button on the elevator, in the hope that you'll save a few precious seconds?\nOr got frustrated at the person stood next to you at the cross-walk, neglecting to press the button?\nWell, maybe they know something you don't, or perhaps you know this already.\nMany buttons in our society lie to us.\n[David McRaney](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/10/placebo-buttons/) dubbed these, \"Placebo buttons\" and they're everywhere.\nThose elevator doors won't close any faster and the cross-walk button has no effect on the lights.\nThe only lights they control are the lights on the buttons themselves.\nThey give you the feedback you crave, but that's all they're doing.\n\nThese placebos aren't constrained to the physical world, they're prevalent in [UI design](/blog/the-evolution-of-ux-at-gitlab/) too.\nFrom literal placebo buttons like [YouTube's downvote](https://www.quora.com/Does-downvoting-a-comment-on-YouTube-even-do-anything), to more subtle effects like Instagram always [pretending to work](https://www.fastcompany.com/1669788/the-3-white-lies-behind-instagrams-lightning-speed), or progress bars that have a [fixed animation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/).\nThey're everywhere if you know where to look.\n\nAt GitLab, we created a placebo of our own in one of our core features; the pipeline graph.\n\nThose of you who have used our pipeline graph, will be familiar with its appearance.\nThere's a series of jobs, grouped by stages, connected by a series of lines depicting the relationships between the jobs.\nBut these lines might be lying to you.\nThese lines are indiscriminately drawn between each job in a stage, regardless of their relationship.\nThese lines are placebos.\n\n![The old pipeline rendering with lines connecting every job in a stage](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_old-graph.png)\n\nThis wasn't a problem to begin with.\nA basic pipeline has several jobs across a handful of stages.\nJobs in each stage would run parallel to each other, but each stage would run sequentially.\nIn the image shown above, all the jobs in the test stage would trigger at the same time. Once those jobs had finished, all the jobs in the build stage would trigger.\nWe used rudimentary CSS to draw lines connecting each job in one stage to each job in the next.\nThese lines weren't calculated based on their connections, but still reflected the story they were telling.\n\nSince the introduction of `needs` relationships in [v12.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/47063), pipelines got a bit more complicated.\nNow you could configure a job in a later stage to trigger as soon as a job in an earlier stage completed.\nLooking at our old example, we could set the API deployment to run as soon as our spec tests passed.\nThis skips the remaining tests and the entire build stage, turning our lines into pretty little liars.\n\nWe had many internal discussions about these lines, and how to show the relationships between jobs.\nThere's the [`needs` visualization](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/#needs-visualization), which does an excellent job of displaying these relationships, but the main pipeline graph was still inaccurate.\nFor the past few months, we've been [refactoring the pipeline graph](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/276949), giving it a new lease of life and fixing some of its issues along the way.\nOne of those issues were the faked lines.\nIn the new version, we can accurately draw lines between jobs.\nLines that actually depict the relationships jobs have with each other.\nNow the lines no-longer lie!\n\n![The newer pipeline graph showing the correct needs links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_new-graph.png)\n\nThe above image shows an unreleased version of the pipeline graph.\nYou can see the lines drawn between the jobs to show that the `deploy:API` job can start as soon as the `rspec` job is successful.\nSomething the old lines (shown earlier in this post) would have been unable to depict.\n\nOne unfortunate downside of this is that these lines can be quite expensive to calculate.\nThey're actual DOM nodes, drawn deliberately and placed precisely.\nOn smaller graphs this isn't a problem, but some of our initial tests have found pipelines with a potential 8000+ job connections.\nThat kind of calculation would grind the browser to a halt, and nobody wants that.\n\nAt GitLab, we believe in boring solutions.\nWe make the simple change that sets us on the path towards where we want to be.\nShip it, get feedback, and iterate.\nSo that's what we did.\nIn the first phase of this rollout, we shipped the new pipeline graph with no lines connecting the jobs.\nWe don't have to worry about the expensive calculations, and we still get to roll out the refactored pipeline graph.\n\n![The current (v13.11) pipeline graph showing no links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_current-graph.png)\n\nWe know some of you will miss them, but fear not.\nBoring solutions are just technical debt if you don't iterate on them.\nSo the [improved lines are coming](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4509) in a future release, along with several other improvements to the pipeline graph.\nWe're already starting to roll out the new [Job Dependencies](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/298973) view which shows the jobs in a (much closer to) execution order.\nStay tuned for more updates, and watch [Sarah Groff Hennigh Palermo's talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2EKqKjB7OQ) for the technical side of this effort and a deeper dive into some of the decisions we made.\n",[737,738,739,740],"CI","frontend","agile","design",{"slug":742,"featured":12,"template":13},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"promotions":744},[745,759,770],{"id":746,"categories":747,"header":749,"text":750,"button":751,"image":756},"ai-modernization",[748],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":752,"config":753},"Get your AI maturity 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