GitLab Agile Portfolio Management - Hands-On Lab: Reporting & Portfolio Management

Estimated time to complete: 20 minutes

Objectives

GitLab provides different analytics insights for instances, groups, and projects. In this lab, we will explore various dashboards one can use in your system, as well as how to create your own insights.

Task A. Accessing Built-in Dashboards

GitLab offers several built-in dashboards at both the project and group level. Let’s look at a few of them now.

1. Navigate to your project repository.

2. Click on Analytics in the left sidebar.

3. Explore the available dashboard options:

   • Value Stream Analytics - Shows the time it takes for code changes to move through your development lifecycle
   • CI/CD Analytics - Focuses on pipelines and jobs
   • Repository Analytics - Provides insights into repository activities like commits and merges
   • Insights - Allows for custom dashboards within your project or group.

Now that we have some understanding on how dashboards look and function, let’s create a dashboard for our project. To create a custom dashboard we will need to create our own .gitlab/insights.yml file, define its content, and save this configuration.

Task B. Creating an Insights File

1. In your repository, click the + button, and click Create new directory.

2. Name the directory .gitlab, and commit on the main branch.

3. Inside the .gitlab directory, click the + button, and click Create new file.

4. Title the file insights.yml.

5. Copy the content below into the file and press Commit changes.

bugsCharts:
  title: "Insights for Awesome App"
  charts:
    - title: "Team Progress"
      description: "Tracking how many issues are being worked on by the development team over a month"
      type: bar
      query:
        data_source: issuables
        params:
          issuable_type: issue
          issuable_state: opened
          filter_labels:
            - Dev
          group_by: month
          period_limit: 30

This insight will help you track your work done by your team over a month.

1. Review the resulting insight under the Analytics > Insights tab. If your dashboard is not displaying correctly, wait a few moments for it to refresh.

Lab Guide Complete

You have completed this lab exercise. You can view the other lab guides for this course.

Suggestions?

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