Incident Management

Incident Management

Incidents are anomalous conditions that result in—or may lead to—service degradation or outages. These events require human intervention to avert disruptions or restore service to operational status. Incidents are always given immediate attention.

The goal of incident management is to organize chaos into swift incident resolution. To that end, incident management provides:

1. well-defined roles and responsibilities and workflow for members of the incident team,
2. control points to manage the flow information and the resolution path,
3. an incident review where lessons and techniques are extracted and shared

When an incident starts, the incident automation sends a message in the #incident-management channel containing a link to a per-incident Slack channel for text based communication, the incident issue for permanent records, and the Situation Room Zoom link for incident team members to join for synchronous verbal and screen-sharing communication.

Scheduled Maintenance

Scheduled maintenance that is a C1 should be treated as an undeclared incident.

30-minutes before the maintenance window starts, the Engineering Manager who is responsible for the change should notify the SRE on-call, the Release Managers and the CMOC to inform them that the maintenance is about to begin.

Coordination and communication should take place in the Situation Room Zoom so that it is quick and easy to include other engineers if there is a problem with the maintenance.

If a related incident occurs during the maintenance procedure, the EM should act as the Incident Manager for the duration of the incident.

If a separate unrelated incident occurs during the maintenance procedure, the engineers involved in the scheduled maintenance should vacate the Situation Room Zoom in favour of the active incident.

Ownership

By default, the EOC is the owner of the incident. The incident owner can delegate ownership to another engineer or escalate ownership to the IM at any time. There is only ever one owner of an incident and only the owner of the incident can declare an incident resolved. At anytime the incident owner can engage the next role in the hierarchy for support. The incident issue should be assigned to the current owner.

Roles and Responsibilities

Clear delineation of responsibilities is important during an incident. Quick resolution requires focus and a clear hierarchy for delegation of tasks. Preventing overlaps and ensuring a proper order of operations is vital to mitigation.

To make your role clear edit your zoom name to start with your role when you join the Zoom meeting. For Example “IM - John Doe” To edit your name during a zoom call, click on the three dots by your name in your video tile and choose the “rename” option. Edits made during a zoom call only last for the length of the call, so it should automatically revert to your profile name/title with the next call.

These definitions imply several on-call rotations for the different roles. Note that not all incidents include engagement from Incident Managers or Communication Managers.

Engineer on Call (EOC) Responsibilities

The Engineer On Call is responsible for the mitigation of impact and resolution to the incident that was declared. The EOC should reach out to the Incident Manager for support if help is needed or others are needed to aid in the incident investigation.

For Sev3 and Sev4 incidents, the EOC is also responsible for Incident Manager Responsibilities, second to mitigating and resolving the incident.

1. As EOC, your highest priority for the duration of your shift is the stability of GitLab.com.
2. When there is uncertainty of the cause of a degradation or outage, the first action of the EOC is to evaluate whether any changes can be reverted. It is always appropriate to toggle (to previous state) any recently changed application feature flags without asking for permission and without hesitation. The next step is to review Change Requests and validate the eligibility criteria for application rollbacks.
3. The SSOT for who is the current EOC is the GitLab Production service definition in PagerDuty.
   1. SREs are responsible for arranging coverage if they will be unavailable for a scheduled shift. To make a request, send a message indicating the days and times for which coverage is requested to the #reliability-lounge Slack channel. If you are unable to find coverage reach out to a Reliability Engineering Manager for assistance.
4. Alerts that are routed to PagerDuty require acknowledgment within 15 minutes, otherwise they will be escalated to the oncall Incident Manager.
   1. Alert-manager alerts in #alerts and #feed_alerts-general are an important source of information about the health of the environment and should be monitored during working hours.
   2. If the PagerDuty alert noise is too high, your task as an EOC is clearing out that noise by either fixing the system or changing the alert.
   3. If you are changing the alert, it is your responsibility to explain the reasons behind it and inform the next EOC that the change occurred.
   4. Each event (may be multiple related pages) should result in an issue in the production tracker. See production queue usage for more details.
5. If sources outside of our alerting are reporting a problem, and you have not received any alerts, it is still your responsibility to investigate. Declare a low severity incident and investigate from there.
   1. Low severity (S3/S4) incidents (and issues) are cheap, and will allow others a means to communicate their experience if they are also experiencing the issue.
   2. “No alerts” is not the same as “no problem”
6. GitLab.com is a complex system. It is ok to not fully understand the underlying issue or its causes. However, if this is the case, as EOC you should page the Incident Manager to find a team member with the appropriate expertise.
   1. Requesting assistance does not mean relinquishing EOC responsibility. The EOC is still responsible for the incident.
   2. The GitLab Organizational Chart and the GitLab Team Page, which lists areas of expertise for team members, are important tools for finding the right people.
7. As soon as an S1/S2 incident is declared, join the The Situation Room Permanent Zoom. The Zoom link is in the #incident-management topic.
   1. GitLab works in an asynchronous manner, but incidents require a synchronous response. Our collective goal is high availability of 99.95% and beyond, which means that the timescales over which communication needs to occur during an incident is measured in seconds and minutes, not hours.
8. It is important that the “Summary” section of incident issues is updated early and often during an incident. This supports our async ability to independently discover the context of an incident and helps all stakeholders (including users) understand the general idea of what is going on.
9. Keep in mind that a GitLab.com incident is not an “infrastructure problem”. It is a company-wide issue, and as EOC, you are leading the response on behalf of the company.
   1. If you need information or assistance, engage with Engineering teams. If you do not get the response you require within a reasonable period, escalate through the Incident Manager.
   2. As EOC, require that those who may be able to assist to join the Zoom call and ask them to post their findings in the incident issue or active incident Google doc. Debugging information in Slack will be lost and this should be strongly discouraged.
10. By acknowledging an incident in PagerDuty, the EOC is implying that they are working on it. To further reinforce this acknowledgement, post a note in Slack that you are joining the The Situation Room Permanent Zoom as soon as possible.
    1. If the EOC believes the alert is incorrect, comment on the thread in #production. If the alert is flappy, create an issue and post a link in the thread. This issue might end up being a part of RCA or end up requiring a change in the alert rule.
11. Be inquisitive. Be vigilant. If you notice that something doesn’t seem right, investigate further.
12. The EOC should not consider immediate work on an incident completed until the top description section in the Incident Issue (above the “Incident Review” section) is filled out with useful information to describe all the key aspects of the Incident.
13. After the incident is resolved, the EOC should review the comments and ensure that the corrective actions are added to the issue description, regardless of the incident severity. If it has a ~review-requested label, the EOC should start on performing an incident review, in some cases this may be a synchronous review meeting or an async review depending on what is requested by those involved with the incident.

Incident Manager (IM)

For general information about how shifts are scheduled and common scenarios about what to do when you have PTO or need coverage, see the Incident Manager onboarding documentation

When paged, the Incident Managers have the following responsibilities during a Sev1 or Sev2 incident and should be engaged on these tasks immediately when an incident is declared:

1. In the event of an incident which has been triaged and confirmed as a clear Severity 1 impact:
   1. Notify Infrastructure Leadership via PagerDuty, by typing /pd trigger in Slack. In the “Create New Incident” dialog, select “Infrastructure Leadership” as the Impacted Service with a link to the incident in the Description as well as a reminder that Infrastructure Leadership should follow the process for Infrastructure Leadership Escalation. This notification should happen 24/7.
   2. In the case of a large scale outage where there is a serious disruption of service, the Incident Manager should check in with Infrastructure Leadership whether a senior member should be brought into the incident to coordinate and manage recovery efforts. This is to ensure that the person in charge of coordinating multiple parallel recovery efforts has a deeper understanding of what is required to bring services back online. You can page the Infra/SRE managers by using /pd trigger and picking the “Infrastructure Leadership” Service. You can also add responders to an existing PagerDuty alert via adding the Infra-SRE Managers Escalation contact.
2. Consider engaging the release-management team if a code change related issue is identified as a potential cause and we need to explore rollbacks or expedited deployment. This can be done by using their slack handle release-managers
3. Responsible for posting regular status updates in the Current Status section of the incident issue description. These updates should summarize the current customer impact of the incident and actions we are taking to mitigate the incident. This is the most important section of the incident issue, it will be referenced to status page updates, and should provide a summary of the incident and impact that can be understood by the wider community.
4. Ensure that the incident issue has all of the required labels applied.
5. Ensure that the incident issue is appropriately restricted based on data classification.
6. If present, ensure that the Summary for CMOC notice / Exec summary in the incident description is filled out as soon as possible.
7. Ensure that necessary public communications are made accurately and in a timely fashion by the Communications Manager. Be mindful that, due to the directive to err on the side of declaring incidents early and often, we should first confirm customer impact with the Engineer On Call prior to approving customer status updates.
8. Ensure that all corrective actions, investigations or followups have corresponding issues created and associated to the incident issue.
9. Ensuring that the Timeline section of the incident is accurate.
10. Ensuring that the root cause is stated clearly and plainly in the incident description, linking to a confidential note or issue if the root cause cannot be made public.
11. Determining when the incident has been resolved and ensuring that it is closed and labeled when there is no more user impact.
12. If necessary, help the EOC to engage development using the InfraDev escalation process.
13. If applicable, coordinate the incident response with business contingency activities.
14. If there is a ~review-requested label on the incident, after the incident is resolved, the Incident Manager is the DRI of the post-incident review. The DRI role can be delegated.
15. Following the first significant Severity 1 or 2 incident for a new Incident Manager, schedule a feedback coffee chat with the Engineer On Call, Communications Manager On Call, and (optionally) any other key participants to receive actionable feedback on your engagement as Incident Manager.
16. For all Severity 1 and Severity 2 incidents that are communicated on the GitLab.com status page, initiate an async incident review and inform the Engineering Manager of the team owning the root cause that they will need to initiate the Feature Change Lock process.

The Incident Manager is the DRI for all of the items listed above, but it is expected that the IM will do it with the support of the EOC or others who are involved with the incident. If an incident runs beyond a scheduled shift, the Incident Manager is responsible for handing over to the incoming IM.

The IM won’t be engaged on these tasks unless they are paged, which is why the default is to page them for all Sev1 and Sev2 incidents. In other situations, page the Incident Manager to engage them.

Incident Manager Coordinator

1. Around the 1st Tuesday of each month:
   • The coordinator will review any open ~IM-Onboarding::Ready and ~IM-Offboarding issues on the IM onboarding/offboarding board and add these team members to the schedule.
   • The schedule is updated by creating an MR that updates im_locals.tf. A single MR is created for all users that need updating. They will be assigned to the appropriate shift and the start_date will be set to the beginning of the second full month after the current day. For example, if the current day is Jan 5, the start_date will be make to go into effect during the first week of March.
2. An announcement will be posted in #im-general indicating that the schedule has been modified with a link to the MR and a brief overview of who was added or removed.
3. All issues on the IM onboarding/offboarding board need to be reviewed once a month for overdue due dates. If any issues are overdue, the coordinator will need to check in with the author to see if they need more time or support to finish their on-boarding.

Engineer on-call Coordinator

The EOC Coordinator is focused on improving SRE on-call quality of life and setting up processes to keep on-call engineers across the entire company operating at a high level of confidence.

Responsibilities of this role:

1. Identifying gaps in process and tooling that help EOC increase QoL, capture via PI.
2. Coordinating regular training and workshops.
3. Enabling knowledge transfer between SREs as a follow up to incident reviews and notable incidents.
4. Facilitate larger changes regarding incident management through coordination and priority setting with other teams inside of SaaS Platforms.

The EOC Coordinator will work closely with the Ops Team on core on-call and incident management concerns, and engage other teams across the organization as needed.

Communications Manager on Call (CMOC) Responsibilities

For serious incidents that require coordinated communications across multiple channels, the Incident Manager will rely on the CMOC for the duration of the incident.

The GitLab support team staffs an oncall rotation and via the Incident Management - CMOC service in PagerDuty. They have a section in the support handbook for getting new CMOC people up to speed.

During an incident, the CMOC will:

1. Be the voice of GitLab during an incident by updating our end-users and internal parties through updates to our status page hosted by Status.io.
   • Tip: use /incident post-statuspage on Slack to create an incident on Status.io. Any updates to the incident will have to be done manually by following these instructions.
2. Update the status page at regular intervals in accordance with the severity of the incident.
3. Notify GitLab stakeholders (customer success and community team) of current incident and reference where to find further information. Provide additional update when the incident is mitigated.
4. Given GitLab’s directive to err on the side of declaring incidents early and often, it is important for the Communications Manager not to make public communications without first confirming with the Engineer on Call and Incident Manager that the incident has significant external customer impact. Rushing to communicate incidents before understanding impact can lead to a public perception of reliability impacts that may not be accurate, because we regularly declare an incident at Severity 1 or 2 initially and then downgrade it one or even two levels once the scope of customer impact is more clearly understood.

Infrastructure Leader

To page the Incident Leader directly, run /pd trigger and choose the Infrastructure Leader as the impacted service.

The Infrastructure Leadership is on the escalation path for both Engineer On Call (EOC) and Incident Manager (IM). This is not a substitute or replacement for the active Incident Manager (unless the current IM is unavailable).

They will be paged in the following circumstances:

1. If IM is unable to respond to a page within 15 minutes.
2. If there are multiple ongoing incidents that is overloading the EOC, or if coordination is required among multiple SREs, the Infrastructure Leader can be paged to help coordinate recovery and bring in additional help if needed.

When paged, the Infrastructure Leader will:

1. Join the incident call
2. Ask the EOC if help is needed from additional SREs.
3. Ask the IM to ensure they are able to fulfill their duties.
4. Evaluate whether a separate zoom should be created for technical investigations.
5. Be the primary technical point of contact for the IM/CMOC to ensure the EOC can focus completely on remediation.

Infrastructure Liaison

To page the Incident Liaison directly, run /pd trigger and choose the Infrastructure Liaison as the impacted service.

During a verified Severity 1 Incident the IM will page the Infrastructure Liaison. This is not a substitute or replacement for the active Incident Manager.

When paged, the Infrastructure Liaison will:

1. Make an overall evaluation of the incident and further validation of Severity.
2. Assist with further support from other teams, including those outside of Engineering (as appropriate)
3. Post a notice to e-group slack channel. This notice does not have to be expedited, but should occur once there is a solid understanding of user impact as well as the overall situation and current response activities. The e-group notice should be in this format

:s1: **Incident on GitLab.com**
**— Summary —**
(include high level summary)
**— Customer Impact —**
(describe the impact to users including which service/access methods and what percentage of users)
**— Current Response —**
(bullet list of actions)
**— Production Issue —**
 Main incident: (link to the incident)
 Slack Channel: (link to incident slack channel)

1. After posting the notice, continue to engage with the incident as needed and also post updates to a thread of the e-group notification when there are material/significant updates.

References

Other escalations

Further support is available from the Scalability and Delivery Groups if required. Scalability leadership can be reached via PagerDuty Scalability Escalation (further details available on their team page). Delivery leadership can be reached via PagerDuty. See the Release Management Escalation steps on the Delivery group page.

Incident Mitigation Methods - EOC/Incident Manager

1. If wider user impact has been established during an S1 or S2 incident, as EOC you have the authority - without requiring further permission - to Block Users as needed in order to mitigate the incident. Make sure to follow Support guidelines regarding Admin Notes, leaving a note that contains a link to the incident, and any further notes explaining why the user is being blocked.
   1. If users are blocked, then further follow-up will be required. This can either take place during the incident, or after it has been mitigated, depending on time-constraints.
      1. If the activity on the account is considered abusive, report the user to Trust and Safety so that the account can be permanently blocked and cleaned-up. Depending on the nature of the event, the EOC may also consider reaching out to the SIRT team.
      2. If not, open a related confidential incident issue and assign it to CMOC to reach out to the user, explaining why we had to block their account temporarily.
      3. If the EOC is unable to determine whether the user’s traffic was malicious or not, please engage the SIRT team to carry out an investigation.

When to Engage an Incident Manager?

If any of the following are true, it would be best to engage an Incident Manager:

1. There is a S1/P1 report or security incident.
2. An entire path or part of functionality of the GitLab.com application must be blocked.
3. Any unauthorized access to a GitLab.com production system
4. Two or more S3 or higher incidents to help delegate to other SREs.

Please note that when an incident is upgraded in severity (for example from S3 to S1), PagerDuty does not automatically page the Incident Manager or Communications Manager and they must be paged manually.

What happens when there are simultaneous incidents?

Occasionally we encounter multiple incidents at the same time. Sometimes a single Incident Manager can cover multiple incidents. This isn’t always possible, especially if there are two simultaneous high-severity incidents with significant activity.

When there are multiple incidents and you decide that additional incident manager help is required, take these actions:

1. Post a slack message in #im-general as well as #incident-management asking for additional Incident Manager help.
2. If your ask is not addressed via slack, escalate to Infrastructure Leadership in PagerDuty.

If a second incident zoom is desired, choose which incident will move to the new zoom and create a new meeting in zoom. Be sure to edit the channel topic of the incident slack channel to indicate the correct zoom link.

Weekend Escalations

EOCs are responsible for responding to alerts even on the weekends. Time should not be spent mitigating the incident unless it is a ~severity::1 or ~severity::2. Mitigation for ~severity::3 and ~severity::4 incidents can occur during normal business hours, Monday-Friday. If you have any questions on this please reach out to an Infrastructure Engineering Manager.

If a ~severity::3 and ~severity::4 occurs multiple times and requires weekend work, the multiple incidents should be combined into a single severity::2 incident. If assistance is needed to determine severity, EOCs and Incident Managers are encouraged to contact Reliability Leadership via PagerDuty

Incident Manager Escalation

A page will be escalated to the Incident Manager (IM) if it is not answered by the Engineer on Call (EOC). This escalation will happen for all alerts that go through PagerDuty, which includes lower severity alerts. It’s possible that this can happen when there is a large number of pages and the EOC is unable to focus on acknowledging pages. When this occurs, the IM should reach out in Slack in the #incident-management channel to see if the EOC needs assistance.

Example:

@sre-oncall, I just received an escalation. Are you available to look into LINK_TO_PAGERDUTY_INCIDENT, or do you need some assistance?

If the EOC does not respond because they are unavailable, you should escalate the incident using the PagerDuty application, which will alert Infrastructure Engineering leadership.

How to engage the EOC, IM or CMOC?

If during an incident, the EOC, Incident Manager or, CMOC need to be engaged, page the person on-call using one of the following. This triggers a PagerDuty incident and page the appropriate person based on the Impacted Service that you select.

• Use the /pd trigger command in Slack, select the Impacted Service based on the role below, or
• Directly from PagerDuty, navigate to Incidents page in PagerDuty, create a new incident and select the Impacted Service based on the role below.

Incidents requiring direct customer interaction

If, during an S1 or S2 incident, it is determined that it would be beneficial to have a synchronous conversation with one or more customers a new Zoom meeting should be utilized for that conversation. Typically there are two situations which would lead to this action:

1. An incident which is uniquely impacting a single, or small number, of customers where their insight into how they are using GitLab.com would be valuable to finding a solution.
2. A large-scale incident, such as a multi-hour full downtime or regional DR event, when it is desired to have synchronous conversation with key customers, typically to provide another form of update or to answer further questions.

Due to the overhead involved and the risk of detracting from impact mitigation efforts, this communication option should be used sparingly and only when a very clear and distinct need is present.

Implementing a direct customer interaction call for an incident is to be initiated by the current Incident Manager by taking these steps:

1. Identify a second Incident Manager who will be dedicated to the customer call. If not already available in the incident, announce the need in #im-general with a message like /here A second incident manager is required for a customer interaction call for XXX.
2. Page the Infrastructure Leadership pagerduty rotation for additional assistance and awareness.
3. Identify a Customer Success Manager who will act as the primary CSM and also be dedicated to the customer call. If this role is not clear, also refer to Infrastructure Leadership for assistance.
4. Request that both of these additional roles join the main incident to come up to speed on the incident history and current status. If necessary to preserve focus on mitigation, this information sharing may be done in another Zoom meeting (which could then also be used for the customer conversation)

After learning of the history and current state of the incident the Engineering Communications Lead will initiate and manage the customer interaction through these actions:

1. Start a new Zoom meeting - unless one is already in progress - invite the primary CSM.
2. The Engineering Communications Lead and CSM should appropriately set their Zoom name to indicate GitLab, as well as their Role, CSM Engineering Communications Lead
3. Through the CSM, invite any customers who are required for the discussion.
4. The Engineering Communications Lead and the Incident Manager need to prioritize async updates that will allow for the correct information to flow between conversations. Consider using the incident slack channel for this but agree before the customer call starts.
5. Both the Engineering Communications Lead and CSM should remain in the Zoom with the customers for the full time required for the incident. To avoid loss of context, neither should “jump” back and forth from the internal incident Zoom and the customer interaction Zoom.

In some scenarios it may be necessary for most all participants of an incident (including the EOC, other developers, etc.) to work directly with a customer. In this case, the customer interaction Zoom shall be used, NOT the main GitLab Incident Zoom. This will allow for the conversation (as well as text chat) while still supporting the ability for primary responders to quickly resume internal communications in the main Incident Zoom. Since the main incident Zoom may be used for multiple incidents it will also prevent the risk of confidential data leakage and prevent the inefficiency of having to frequently announce that there are customers in the main incident zoom each time the call membership changes.

Corrective Actions

Corrective Actions (CAs) are work items that we create as a result of an incident. Only issues arising out of an incident should receive the label ~"corrective action". They are designed to prevent the same kind of incident or improve the time to mitigation and as such are part of the Incidence Management cycle. Corrective Actions must be related to the incident issue to help with downstream analysis.

Corrective Actions issues in the Reliability project should be created using the Corrective Action issue template to ensure consistency in format, labels and application/monitoring of service level objectives for completion

Issues that have the ~"corrective action" label will automatically have the ~"infradev" label applied. This is done so teams these issues are follow the same process we have for development to resolve them in specific time-frames. For more details see the infradev process.

Best practices and examples, when creating a Corrective Action issue

• Use SMART criteria: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bounded.
• Link to the incident they arose from.
• Assign a Severity label designating the highest severity of related incidents.
• Assign a priority label indicating the urgency of the work. By default, this should match the incident Severity
• Assign the label for the associated affected service if applicable.
• Provide enough context so that any engineer in the Corrective Action issue’s project could pick up the issue and know how to move forward with it.
• Avoid creating Corrective Actions that:
  • Are too generic (most typical mistake, as opposed to Specific)
  • Only fix incident symptoms.
  • Introduce more human error.
  • Will not help to keep the incident from happening again.
  • Can not be promptly implemented (time-bounded).
• Examples: (taken from several best-practices Postmortem pages)

Runbooks

Runbooks are available for engineers on call. The project README contains links to checklists for each of the above roles.

In the event of a GitLab.com outage, a mirror of the runbooks repository is available on at https://ops.gitlab.net/gitlab-com/runbooks.

Who is the Current EOC?

Use the @sre-oncall handle to check who the current EOC is

When to Contact the Current EOC

The current EOC can be contacted via the @sre-oncall handle in Slack, but please only use this handle in the following scenarios.

1. You need assistance in halting the deployment pipeline. note: this can also be accomplished by Reporting an Incident and labeling it with ~blocks deployments.
2. You are conducting a production change via our Change Management process and as a required step need to seek the approval of the EOC.
3. For all other concerns please see the Getting Assistance section.

The EOC will respond as soon as they can to the usage of the @sre-oncall handle in Slack, but depending on circumstances, may not be immediately available. If it is an emergency and you need an immediate response, please see the Reporting an Incident section.

Reporting an Incident

If you are a GitLab team member and would like to report a possible incident related to GitLab.com and have the EOC paged in to respond, choose one of the reporting methods below. Regardless of the method chose, please stay online until the EOC has had a chance to come online and engage with you regarding the incident. Thanks for your help!

Report an Incident via Slack

Type /incident declare in the #production channel in GitLab’s Slack and follow the prompts to open an incident issue. It is always better to err on side of choosing a higher severity, and declaring an incident for a production issue, even if you aren’t sure. Reporting high severity bugs via this process is the preferred path so that we can make sure we engage the appropriate engineering teams as needed.

Incident Declaration Slack window

Incident Declaration Results

As well as opening a GitLab incident issue, a dedicated incident Slack channel will be opened. The “woodhouse” bot will post links to all of these resources in the main #incident-management channel. Please note that unless you’re an SRE, you won’t be able to post in #incident-management directly. Please join the dedicated Slack channel, created and linked as a result of the incident declaration, to discuss the incident with the on-call engineer.

Report an Incident via Email

Email gitlab-production-eoc@gitlab.pagerduty.com. This will immediately page the Engineer On Call.

Definition of Outage vs Degraded vs Disruption and when to Communicate

This is a first revision of the definition of Service Disruption (Outage), Partial Service Disruption, and Degraded Performance per the terms on Status.io. Data is based on the graphs from the Key Service Metrics Dashboard

Outage and Degraded Performance incidents occur when:

1. Degraded as any sustained 5 minute time period where a service is below its documented Apdex SLO or above its documented error ratio SLO.
2. Outage (Status = Disruption) as a 5 minute sustained error rate above the Outage line on the error ratio graph

In both cases of Degraded or Outage, once an event has elapsed the 5 minutes, the Engineer on Call and the Incident Manager should engage the CMOC to help with external communications. All incidents with a total duration of more than 5 minutes should be publicly communicated as quickly as possible (including “blip” incidents), and within 1 hour of the incident occurring.

SLOs are documented in the runbooks/rules

To check if we are Degraded or Disrupted for GitLab.com, we look at these graphs:

1. Web Service
   • Error Ratio
   • Apdex
2. API Service
   • Error Ratio
   • Apdex
3. Git service(public facing git interactions)
   • Error Ratio
   • Apdex
4. GitLab Pages service
   • Error Ratio
   • Apdex
5. Registry service
   • Error Ratio
   • Apdex
6. Sidekiq
   • Error Ratio
   • Apdex

A Partial Service Disruption is when only part of the GitLab.com services or infrastructure is experiencing an incident. Examples of partial service disruptions are instances where GitLab.com is operating normally except there are:

1. delayed CI/CD pending jobs
2. delayed repository mirroring
3. high severity bugs affecting a particular feature like Merge Requests
4. Abuse or degradation on 1 gitaly node affecting a subset of git repos. This would be visible on the Gitaly service metrics

High Severity Bugs

In the case of high severity bugs, we prefer that an incident issue is still created via Reporting an Incident. This will give us an incident issue on which to track the events and response.

In the case of a high severity bug that is in an ongoing, or upcoming deployment please follow the steps to Block a Deployment.

Security Incidents

If an incident may be security related, engage the Security Engineer on-call by using /security in Slack. More detail can be found in Engaging the Security Engineer On-Call.

Communication

Information is an asset to everyone impacted by an incident. Properly managing the flow of information is critical to minimizing surprise and setting expectations. We aim to keep interested stakeholders apprised of developments in a timely fashion so they can plan appropriately.

This flow is determined by:

1. the type of information,
2. its intended audience,
3. and timing sensitivity.

Furthermore, avoiding information overload is necessary to keep every stakeholder’s focus.

To that end, we will have: 

1. a dedicated Zoom call for all incidents. A link to the Zoom call can be found in the topic for the #incident-management room in Slack.
2. a Google Doc as needed for multiple user input based on the shared template
3. a dedicated #incident-management channel for internal updates
4. regular updates to status.gitlab.com via status.io that disseminates to various media (e.g. Twitter)
5. a dedicated repo for issues related to Production separate from the queue that holds Infrastructure’s workload: namely, issues for incidents and changes.

Status

We manage incident communication using status.io, which updates status.gitlab.com. Incidents in status.io have state and status and are updated by the incident owner.

To create an incident on status.io, you can use /incident post-statuspage on Slack.

Status during Security Incidents

In some cases, we may choose not to post to status.io, the following are examples where we may skip a post/tweet. In some cases, this helps protect the security of self managed instances until we have released the security update.

• If a partial block of a URL is possible, for example to exclude problematic strings in a path.
• If there is no usage of the URL in the last week based on searches in our logs for GitLab.com.

States and Statuses

Definitions and rules for transitioning state and status are as follows.

Status can be set independent of state. The only time these must align is when an issues is

Severities

Incident Severity

Incident severity should be assigned at the beginning of an incident to ensure proper response across the organization. Incident severity should be determined based on the information that is available at the time. Severities can and should be adjusted as more information becomes available. The severity level reflects the maximum impact the incident had and should remain in that level even after the incident was mitigated or resolved.

Incident Managers and Engineers On-Call can use the following table as a guide for assigning incident severity.

Alert Severities

1. Alerts severities do not necessarily determine incident severities. A single incident can trigger a number of alerts at various severities, but the determination of the incident’s severity is driven by the above definitions.
2. Over time, we aim to automate the determination of an incident’s severity through service-level monitoring that can aggregate individual alerts against specific SLOs.

Incident Data Classification

There are four data classification levels defined in GitLab’s Data Classification Standard.

• RED data should never be included in incident issues, even if the issue is confidential.
• ORANGE and YELLOW data can be included and the Incident Manager managing the incident should ensure the incident issue is marked as confidential or is in an internal note.

The Incident Manager should exercise caution and their best judgement, in general we prefer to use internal notes instead of marking an entire issue confidential if possible. A couple lines of non-descript log data may not represent a data security concern, but a larger set of log, query, or other data must have more restrictive access. If assistance is required follow the Infrastructure Liaison Escalation process.

Incident Workflow

Summary

In order to effectively track specific metrics and have a single pane of glass for incidents and their reviews, specific labels are used. The below workflow diagram describes the path an incident takes from open to closed. All S1 incidents require a review, other incidents can also be reviewed as described here.

GitLab uses the Incident Management feature of the GitLab application. Incidents are reported and closed when they are resolved. A resolved incident means the degradation has ended and will not likely re-occur.

If there is additional follow-up work that requires more time after an incident is resolved and closed (like a detailed root cause analysis or a corrective action) a new issue may need to be created and linked to the incident issue. It is important to add as much information as possible as soon as an incident is resolved while the information is fresh, this includes a high level summary and a timeline where applicable.

Assignees

The EOC and the Incident Manager On Call, at the time of the incident, are the default assignees for an incident issue. They are the assignees for the entire workflow of the incident issue.

Timeline

Incidents use the Timeline Events feature, the timeline can be viewed by selecting the “Timeline” tab on the incident. By default, all label events are added to the Timeline, this includes ~"Incident::Mitigated" and ~"Incident::Resolved". At a minimum, the timeline should include when start and end times of user impact. You may also want to highlight notes in the discussion, this is done by selecting the clock icon on the note which will automatically add it to the timeline. For adding timeline items quickly, use the quick action, for example:

/timeline DB load spiked resulting in performance issues | 2022-09-07 09:30
/timeline DB load spike mitigated by blocking malicious traffic | 2022-09-07 10:00

Labeling

The following labels are used to track the incident lifecycle from active incident to completed incident review. Label Source

Workflow Labeling

In order to help with attribution, we also label each incident with a scoped label for the Infrastructure Service (Service::) and Group (group::) scoped labels among others.

Root Cause Labeling

Labeling incidents with a Root Cause is done for the categorization of incidents when deploy pipelines are blocked. For this reason, a label with the prefix ~RootCause is required whenever an incident has the ~"release-blocker" label. The person assigned to the incident is responsible for adding the appropriate Root Cause label.

The current Root Cause labels are listed below. In order to support trend awareness these labels are meant to be high-level, not too numerous, and as consistent as possible over time.

Customer Communications Labeling

We want to be able to report on a scope of incidents which have met a level of impact which necessitated customer communications. An underlying assumption is that any material impact will always be communicated in some form. Incidents are to be labeled indicating communications even if the impact is later determined to be lesser, or when the communication is done by mistake.

Note: This does not include Contact Requests where the communication is due to identifying a cause.

The CMOC is responsible for ensuring this label is set for all incidents involving use of the Status Page or where other direct notification to a set of customers is completed (such as via Zendesk).

Service Labeling

• In the incident description, we allow multiple service labels for impact. The service label on the incident issue itself should be for the root cause, not the impact.
• All Infrastructure changes and configuration that is maintained by the Infrastructure department (not application code) should use one of the specific labels for the component (eg: Consul, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.), or the ~Service::Infrastructure label
• We may not know what service caused the impact until after the incident. In that case, it is best to use the Service::Unknown label until more information is available.

It is not always very clear which service label to apply, especially when causes span service boundaries that we define in Infrastructure. When unsure, it’s best to choose a label that corresponds to the primary cause of the incident, even if other services are involved.

The following services should primarily be used for application code changes or feature flag changes, not changes to configuration or code maintained by the Infrastructure department:

• ~Service::API
• ~Service::Web
• ~Service::Git
• ~Service::Registry
• ~Service::Pages
• ~Service::Gitaly
• ~Service::GitLab Rails

Service labeling examples:

“Needed” and “NotNeeded” Scoped Labels

The following labels are added and removed automatically by triage-ops:

Required Labeling

These labels are always required on incident issues.

Other Incident Labels

These labels are added to incident issues as a mechanism to add metadata for the purposes of metrics and tracking.

Duplicates

When an incident is created that is a duplicate of an existing incident it is up to the EOC to mark it as a duplicate. In the case where we mark an incident as a duplicate, we should issue the following slash command and remove all labels on the incident issue:

/duplicate <incident issue>

Related Issues

There are related issue links on the incident template that should be used to create related issues from an incident.

• Corrective action: Creates a new corrective action in the reliability tracker.
• Investigation followup: Investigation follow-ups for any root cause investigation, analysis or tracking an alert silence that will be done after the incident is resolved
• Confidential / Support contact: For transparency, we prefer to keep incident issues public. If there is confidential information associated with an issue use this template to create a new issue using the confidential template. Use this template to create requests to the support team engage customers (aka Contact Request).
• QA investigation: To engage the QA team for a failing test, or missing coverage for an issue that was found in any environment.
• Infradev: For engaging development for any incident related improvement.

Workflow Diagram

  graph TD
    A(Incident is declared) --> |initial severity assigned - EOC and IM are assigned| B(Incident::Active)
    A -.-> |all labels removed if duplicate| F(closed)
    B --> |"Temporary mitigation is in place (see workflow labeling above)"| C(Incident::Mitigated)
    B --> D
    C --> D(Incident::Resolved)
    D --> |severity is re-assessed| D

    D -.-> |for review-requested incidents| E(Incident::Review-Completed)

• As soon as an incident transitions to Incident::Resolved the incident issue will be closed
• All Severity::1 incidents will automatically be labeled with review-requested

Alert Silences

If an alert silence is created for an active incident, the incident should be resolved with the ~"alertmanager-silence" label and the appropriate root cause label if it is known. There should also be a linked ~infradev issue for the long term solution or an investigation issue created using the related issue links on the incident template.

Incident Board

The board which tracks all GitLab.com incidents from active to reviewed is located here.

Near Misses

A near miss, “near hit”, or “close call” is an unplanned event that has the potential to cause, but does not actually result in an incident.

Background

In the United States, the Aviation Safety Reporting System has been collecting reports of close calls since 1976. Due to near miss observations and other technological improvements, the rate of fatal accidents has dropped about 65 percent. source

As John Allspaw states:

Near misses are like a vaccine. They help the company better defend against more serious errors in the future, without harming anyone or anything in the process.

Handling Near Misses

When a near miss occurs, we should treat it in a similar manner to a normal incident.

1. Open an incident issue, if one is not already opened. Label it with the severity label appropriate to the incident it would have caused, had the incident actually occurred. Label the incident issue with the ~Near Miss label.
2. corrective actions should be treated in the same way as those for an actual incident.
3. Ownership of the incident review should be assigned to the team-member who noticed the near-miss, or, when appropriate, the team-member with the most knowledge of how the near-miss came about.

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