usage_statistics.md

stage: Analytics
group: Product Intelligence
info: To determine the technical writer assigned to the Stage/Group associated with this page, see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments

Usage statistics (FREE SELF)

GitLab Inc. periodically collects information about your instance in order to perform various actions.

All usage statistics are opt-out.

Service Ping

Service Ping is a process that collects and sends a weekly payload to GitLab Inc. For more information, see the Service Ping guide. When Service Ping is enabled, GitLab gathers data from other instances and enables certain instance-level analytics features that are dependent on Service Ping.

Why enable Service Ping?

The main purpose of Service Ping is to build a better GitLab. We collect data about how GitLab is used to understand feature or stage adoption and usage. This data gives an insight into how GitLab adds value and helps our team understand the reasons why people use GitLab, and with this knowledge we're able to make better product decisions.

There are several other benefits to enabling Service Ping:

• Analyze the users' activities over time of your GitLab installation.
• A DevOps Score to give you an overview of your entire instance's adoption of concurrent DevOps from planning to monitoring.
• More proactive support (assuming that our TAMs and support organization used the data to deliver more value).
• Insight and advice into how to get the most value out of your investment in GitLab.
• Reports that show how you compare against other similar organizations (anonymized), with specific advice and recommendations on how to improve your DevOps processes.
• Participation in our Registration Features Program to receive free paid features.

Registration Features Program

Introduced in GitLab 14.1.

In GitLab versions 14.1 and later, GitLab Free customers with a self-managed instance running GitLab Enterprise Edition can receive paid features by registering with GitLab and sending us activity data through Service Ping. Features introduced here do not remove the feature from its paid tier. Users can continue to access the features in a paid tier without sharing usage data.

Features available in 14.1 and later

• Email from GitLab.

Features available in 14.4 and later

• Repository size limit.
• Group access restriction by IP address.

NOTE: Registration is not yet required for participation, but may be added in a future milestone.

Enable registration features

1. Sign in as a user with administrator access.
2. On the top bar, select Menu > Admin.
3. On the left sidebar, select Settings > Metrics and profiling.
4. Expand the Usage statistics section.
5. If not enabled, select the Enable Service Ping checkbox.
6. Select the Enable Registration Features checkbox.
7. Select Save changes.

Version check

If enabled, version check informs you if a new version is available and the importance of it through a status. The status displays on the help pages (/help) for all signed-in users, and on the Admin Area pages. The statuses are:

• Green: You are running the latest version of GitLab.
• Orange: An updated version of GitLab is available.
• Red: The version of GitLab you are running is vulnerable. You should install the latest version with security fixes as soon as possible.

GitLab Inc. collects your instance's version and hostname (through the HTTP referer) as part of the version check. No other information is collected.

This information is used, among other things, to identify to which versions patches must be backported, making sure active GitLab instances remain secure.

If you disable version check, this information isn't collected.

Request flow example

The following example shows a basic request/response flow between a self-managed GitLab instance and the GitLab Version Application:

sequenceDiagram
    participant GitLab instance
    participant Version Application
    GitLab instance->>Version Application: Is there a version update?
    loop Version Check
        Version Application->>Version Application: Record version info
    end
    Version Application->>GitLab instance: Response (PNG/SVG)