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Usage Ping Configuration and Data Transmission

1 post · Mar 2021 – Mar 2025

What this trail covers

GitLab is enhancing its product usage data collection capabilities for Self-Managed and Dedicated instances by enabling event-level data collection. This will provide deeper insights into feature usage, identify trends, enable smarter product improvements, and offer custom insights for customers. Customers will have control over data sharing and can opt-out before collection begins. The data collected is pseudonymized and does not include source code. This builds upon existing Service Ping capabilities.

All GitLab trails
  1. More granular product usage insights for GitLab Self-Managed and DedicatedThis post details the planned enablement of event-level product usage data collection for GitLab Self-Managed and Dedicated instances starting in GitLab 18.0. It explains that this data tracks interactions like initiating CI/CD pipelines, merging merge requests, triggering webhooks, or creating issues. User identifiers will be pseudonymized, and source code will not be collected. The post highlights benefits such as in-depth feature usage analysis, trend discovery, smarter product improvements, and custom insights. It also outlines privacy controls, including a pre-deployment early opt-out, proactive communication, no third-party collectors, detailed documentation, and de-identification approaches.
  2. Usage Ping configuration bug for self-managed instancesThis post details a bug in Usage Ping configuration for self-managed instances that prevented disabling Usage Ping via text configuration files, leading to unintended data collection and transmission. A patch release (13.12.4) was published to fix this bug. The issue affected GitLab versions 9.3 to 13.12.3. Users who suspect data was shared are asked to fill out a form for data purging.
  3. GitLab solicits input on its plans to de-identify service usage dataThis post details plans to de-identify service usage data further by limiting access to identifiable information and introducing a new system to de-identify users and other personal information before it lands in GitLab's analytics environment, allowing for aggregated, de-identified user-level activity at the account level. It also acknowledges a gap for single-user namespaces where de-identification may not be perfect and solicits community input on the design and implementation.