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GitLab

Status Page (ULTIMATE)

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 12.10.

With a GitLab Status Page, you can create and deploy a static website to communicate efficiently to users during an incident. The Status Page landing page displays an overview of recent incidents:

Status Page landing page

Clicking an incident displays a detail page with more information about a particular incident:

Status Page detail

  • Status on the incident, including when the incident was last updated.
  • The incident title, including any emojis.
  • The description of the incident, including emojis.
  • Any file attachments provided in the incident description, or comments with a valid image extension. Introduced in GitLab 13.1.
  • A chronological ordered list of updates to the incident.

Set up a Status Page

To configure a GitLab Status Page you must:

  1. Configure GitLab with your cloud provider information.
  2. Configure your AWS account.
  3. Create a Status Page project on GitLab.
  4. Sync incidents to the Status Page.

Configure GitLab with cloud provider information

Only AWS S3 is supported as a deploy target.

To provide GitLab with the AWS account information needed to push content to your Status Page:

  1. Sign into GitLab as a user with Maintainer or greater permissions.
  2. Navigate to {settings} Settings > Operations. Next to Status Page, click Expand.
  3. Click Active to enable the Status Page feature.
  4. In Status Page URL, provide the URL to your external status page.
  5. Provide the S3 Bucket name. For more information, see Bucket configuration documentation.
  6. Provide the AWS region for your bucket. For more information, see the AWS documentation.
  7. Provide your AWS access key ID and AWS Secret access key.
  8. Click Save changes.

Configure your AWS account

  1. Within your AWS account, create two new IAM policies, using the following files as examples:
  2. Create a new AWS access key with the permissions policies created in the first step.

Create a status page project

After configuring your AWS account, you must add the Status Page project and configure the necessary CI/CD variables to deploy the Status Page to AWS S3:

  1. Fork the Status Page project. You can do this through Repository Mirroring, which ensures you get the up-to-date Status Page features.
  2. Navigate to {settings} Settings > CI/CD.
  3. Scroll to Variables, and click Expand.
  4. Add the following variables from your Amazon Console:

    • S3_BUCKET_NAME - The name of the Amazon S3 bucket. If no bucket with the provided name exists, the first pipeline run creates one and configures it for static website hosting.

    • AWS_DEFAULT_REGION - The AWS region.

    • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - The AWS access key ID.

    • AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - The AWS secret.

  5. Navigate to CI/CD > Pipelines > Run Pipeline, and run the pipeline to deploy the Status Page to S3.

WARNING: Consider limiting who can access issues in this project, as any user who can view the issue can potentially publish comments to your GitLab Status Page.

Sync incidents to the Status Page

After creating the CI/CD variables, configure the Project you want to use for Incident issues:

  1. To view the Operations Settings page, navigate to {settings} Settings > Operations > Status Page.
  2. Fill in your cloud provider's credentials and make sure the Active checkbox is checked.
  3. Click Save changes.

How to use your GitLab Status Page

After configuring your GitLab instance, relevant updates trigger a background job that pushes JSON-formatted data about the incident to your external cloud provider. Your status page website periodically fetches this JSON-formatted data. It formats and displays it to users, providing information about ongoing incidents without extra effort from your team:

graph TB
    subgraph GitLab Instance
    issues(issue updates) -- trigger --> middleware(Background job: JSON generation)
    end
    subgraph Cloud Provider
    middleware --saves data --> c1(Cloud Bucket stores JSON file)
    end
    subgraph Status Page
    d(Static Site on CDN) -- fetches data --> c1
    end

Publish an incident

To publish an incident:

  1. Create an issue in the project you enabled the GitLab Status Page settings in.
  2. A project or group owner must use the /publish quick action to publish the issue to the GitLab Status Page. Confidential issues can't be published.

A background worker publishes the issue onto the Status Page using the credentials you provided during setup. As part of publication, GitLab:

  • Anonymizes user and group mentions with Incident Responder.
  • Removes titles of non-public GitLab references.
  • Publishes any files attached to incident issue descriptions, up to 5000 per issue. (Introduced in GitLab 13.1.)

After publication, you can access the incident's details page by clicking the Published on status page button displayed under the Incident's title.

Status Page detail link

Update an incident

To publish an update to the Incident, update the incident issue's description.

WARNING: When referenced issues are changed (such as title or confidentiality) the incident they were referenced in is not updated.

Publish comments on incidents

To publish comments to the Status Page Incident:

  • Create a comment on the incident issue.
  • When you're ready to publish the comment, mark the comment for publication by adding a microphone award emoji reaction (:microphone: 🎤) to the comment.
  • Any files attached to the comment (up to 5000 per issue) are also published. (Introduced in GitLab 13.1.)

WARNING: Anyone with access to view the Issue can add an emoji award to a comment, so consider limiting access to issues to team members only.

Update the incident status

To change the incident status from open to closed, close the incident issue within GitLab. Closing the issue triggers a background worker to update the GitLab Status Page website.

If you make a published issue confidential, GitLab unpublishes it from your GitLab Status Page website.