Fulfillment Guide

The Fulfillment Sub-department is responsible for the infrastructure between the systems which affect the user purchasing process.
Resource Areas Covered
Fulfillment Direction Fulfillment vision and what we are working on next.
docs.gitlab.com Subscription Customer-facing documentation around GitLab subscriptions, including Customer Portal (customers.gitlab.com) information.
Fulfillment Guide (this page) Documentation around CustomersDot Admin tools and process documentation that is not part of the docs.gitlab.com Subscription documentation above.
Fulfillment Development Sub-Department Team members, stable counterparts (PM, UX, Quality, Security, EntApps, Field Ops, Sales, Billing, Customer Success, Support Engineering), project management processes, and more.
Internal Handbook - Fulfillment Documentation that can’t be in the public handbook. Minimize this to only Not Public information.
Cloud Licesing Overview (External) Why Cloud Licensing, data collected, customer pre-requisites
Licensing FAQ Common questions around purchasing, licensing, billing, contacting sales, and more
Inventory of Fulfillment Emails List of all Fulfillment emails
GitLab Company Quote-to-Cash documentation Company-wide quote-to-cash documentation

How to connect with us

If your question is not answered by the key links above or this guide:

Fulfillment Feature Availability

Not all Fulfillment features are available at the time for all types of customers, please refer to the availability matrix below.

Cloud Licensing, Auto-Renewal, Quarterly Subscription Reconciliation, and Operational Data availability

Customer Type Cloud Licensing (Y/N) Auto-Renewals (Y/N) Quarterly Subscription Reconciliation (Y/N) Operational Data (Y/N)
Customers with credit card on file Yes Yes Yes Yes
Customers paying with invoice Yes Yes Yes Yes
Customers requiring a PO Yes No No Yes
Customers with an MSA Yes No No No
Customers with multi-year deals Yes No No Yes
Customers purchasing through a GitLab Reseller or other Channel/Alliance Partner Yes No No Yes
Public Sector Customers Yes No No Yes
Customers with offline/airgapped environments Yes
(Offline cloud license released in GitLab 15.0)		 No No No
GitLab for Education, Open Source and Startups Customers No No No No
Free Tier Users No No No No

Storage Enforcement

You can access the internal handbook page for more details about the storage enforcement.

Fufillment support admin tooling

Last updated on 11-Nov-2024

Most of mechanizer functions that are used by support L&R team is being migrated into CustomersDot admin view

  • More details on phased approach can be found in this epic here
  • We are currently making 2 functions available in production as part of our BETA roll out.
  • The goal here is to have these new CustomersDot functions co-exist with Mechanizer and identify any significant gaps during usage
  • Please provide feeback here for future improvements or fixes as needed

New functionality in CustomersDot admin view

Please navigate to support menu item on CustomersDot admin view to find the below functionalities

Trial updates for Saas

  • This new functionality replaces the use of UpdateGitlabplan function on Mechanizer for .com trials
  • Shows a list of trials to edit
  • Click the pencil icon to open edit view of particular trial
  • Edit the end date of the trial
  • Convert to other applicable trials (Premium or Ultimate as applicable) More plans will be available in the future
  • Verify if updated trial is synced to Gitlab.com
  • Demo

Trial updates for SM

  • This new page replaces the use of UpdateGitlabplan function on Mechanizer for SM trials
  • Displays a list of all trials for self managed
  • Add new license tab will allow creation of trial license for user email and user count with a start and end date
  • Please add the Zendesk ticket ID in the notes section for reference
  • Demo

How to get access to this feature on CustomersDot Admin view

This feature is currently limited a few users from LnR support team but can be rolled out others in support once we have tested everything

  • Please note you will require the following permissions to be set via Okta to access these functions on CustomersDot view
    • okta-cdot-prod-support-admins for production
    • okta-cdot-stg-support-admins for staging
  • To be added to these groups - Please raise an AR request and get an approval from support team managers
  • Please note you will not need license read/write permissions on CustomersDot to use these new functions under support menu item.

Temporary renewal extensions

Sales Rep can generate a temporary extension via SFDC for one of the approved reasons. Extension can be generated 1-15 days before subscription end date or 1-13 days after subscription end date, with a default expiration date of 21 days after subscription end date (followed by the grace period of 14 days for SaaS extensions only).

Please note for Self Managed extensions:

  • The 14 day grace period does not apply and the customer will only get a 21 day extension OPEN issue
  • The temporary license generated will only be for the customer’s base plan (Premium or Ultimate). If the customer has a GitLab Duo Pro or GitLab Duo Enterprise add-on, they will lose Duo access when the temporary renewal license is applied to their instance.
  • SM customers may have to manually apply their activation code or license key upon successful renewal if it does not appear automatically on their instance [Some instances may block the sync of renewed license key if the temporary extension is still active].

Additional context about this feature can be found here, including a visual timeline of subscription events related to the temporary renewal extensions.

Please share your feedback about this feature in this issue.

Creating an extension (from SFDC)

Please watch SM demo SM demo video or Gitlab.com/Saas video for an overview of creating an extension.

The process of creating the temporary renewal extension from SFDC is also described below

  1. Go to the SFDC Renewal Opportunity that needs additional processing time.
  2. Click on Request Temporary Extension button.
  3. Temporary Renewal Extension form will load, and display the related OpportunityID and ZuoraSubscriptionID.
  4. Select Reason from the drop down, specify number of Users for the license, add optional Notes, then click Next.
    1. If creating a temporary renewal extension for SaaS subscription, the number of Users is irrelevant - extension will be created for the same number of users as the current subscription.
  5. Once the extension is created, you will see a success message. Otherwise, you will see an error message.
  6. Several updates happen for a successfully created temporary extension:
    1. Several fields on the SFDC Renewal Opportunity are updated:
      1. Temporary License Extension End Date is updated with a date (equal to subscription end date + 21 days).
      2. Exempt Late Renewal Automation is set to true.
      3. Late Renewal Exception Expiration Date is updated with the same value as Temporary License Extension End Date.
    2. Temporary extension record appears on CustomersDot Admin > Temporary Extensions page.
    3. For self-managed, a legacy trial license is created and can be accessed from the Temporary extension record in CustomersDot Admin.
    4. For SaaS, the new temporary extension (once effective) is visible on the gitlab.com group billing page.
    5. An email is sent to the customer with the subject line [GitLab Transactions] GitLab Temporary Renewal Extension. For self-managed, a license key is included in the email.
      • This email is also sent to the Revenue Team, as well as copied to SFDC and displayed under Contact Activity.
    6. Access temporarily extended until YYYY-MM-DD badge is displayed on the related subscription in the Customers Portal.

Viewing and using the extension

Once the temporary renewal extension is created, the evidence of it can be seen in a few places.

  • SFDC Renewal Opportunity has Temporary License Extension End Date field populated with a date when the extension expires.
  • CustomersDot Admin > Temporary Extensions page lists all of the temporary extensions.
  • Customer can see the Access temporarily extended until YYYY-MM-DD badge on the related subscription in the Customers Portal.
    • For self-managed, customer can download the license key and apply it to their instance.
    • For SaaS, the new expiration date is automatically synced to gitlab.com.

Once subscription is renewed, the Access temporarily extended until YYYY-MM-DD badge is removed. This video shows what happens when the grace period of the temporary extension has elapsed, and subscription is renewed.

Possible errors when creating an extension

Error Description
Temporary extension can be requested 15 days prior to subscription expiry up until 13 days after subscription expiry Temporary extension must be created 15 days before subscription end date or up to 13 days after subscription end date.
Subscription has already availed an extension in the current renewal term There can only be one 21-day temporary extension per renewal. No additional extensions are allowed.
Subscription has an upcoming extension starting on YYYY-MM-DD There is an existing temporary extension for the renewal, which hasn’t started yet.
Customer account labeled as having bad debt Billing team has identified this account as having bad debt. You will see either of these fields populated on the Zuora Billing Account: Support hold, Credit hold.
Customer account belongs to a trade restricted country Customers with the SoldTo address in these countries are not eligible for a temporary extension.

All technical problems should be shared with Fulfillment according to these instructions. Once the problem has been reported, please follow the existing process of submitting an Internal Request to Support so that your customer can receive a subscription extension. Use either the GitLab Support Internal Requests for Global customers or GitLab Support Internal Requests for Federal customers request option, then select the appropriate internal request type, either for SaaS or Self-Managed.

Accessing GCP logs

Logs related to the Temporary Renewals Extension functionality can be accessed via GCP using this filter: jsonPayload.functionality="temporary_extension" (example).

Logs can be narrowed down by workflow:

Worfklow Filter Example
API request jsonPayload.workflow="api_request" link to example
Guardrail jsonPayload.workflow="guardrail_check" link to example
Self-managed extension jsonPayload.workflow="create_sm_extension" link to example

Additional attributes can be applied:

Attribute Filter Example
subscription_id jsonPayload.zuora_subscription_id="8a8aa0008aff6981018b0619305f4d1d" link to example
salesforce_opportunity_id jsonPayload.salesforce_opportunity_id="8a8aa0008aff6981018b0619305f4d1d" link to example

Subscription Management Features

List of features managed by the subscription management group within the Fulfillment section.

Subscription Renewal and Auto-Renewal

Customers can renew their gitlab.com or Self-managed subscriptions using either auto-renewal or manual renewal. By default, subscriptions are set to auto-renew. Customers who are not eligible for auto-renew or do not want to auto-renew their subscription can manually renew their subscription through the Renew button on the subscription card in the Customers Portal.

Auto-Renewal eligibility

We will not attempt to auto-renew if:

  • Self-Managed customer is not on Cloud Licensing
  • Customer is not on QSR
  • Customer is on QSR, but QSR failed and there’s overage
  • Customer’s credit card is expired

Auto-renewal will fail if:

  • Credit card payment failed
  • Another system error that wasn’t accounted for previously

Accounts and Subscriptions excluded from auto-renewal:

  1. Subscriptions purchased via a Reseller or another Channel partner (where the customer didn’t transact with GitLab directly).
  2. Subscriptions for Education, OSS, or Startup (i.e. Community Programs).
  3. Subscriptions with non-standard term (not a 12-month term).
  4. Subscriptions with GitLab Duo Pro, GitLab Duo Enterprise, or Enterprise Agile Planning products. This is a temporary measure until this epic is done.
  5. Accounts with the following settings in Zuora:
    1. Account.PO Required = Yes (customer notifies GitLab they have a “no PO, no Pay policy”, booking requirement and pre-billing).
    2. Account.Portal Required = Yes (customer notifies GitLab that they require invoices to be manually uploaded to a billing portal, and includes non-PO, PO, contract, or SOW).
    3. Account.Support Hold = Yes (customers are placed on support hold when accounts become >90 days past due without payment commitment).
    4. Account.Credit Hold = Yes (customers are placed on credit hold when any balance is written off to bad debt)

There’s an automated process (Zuora Workflow) that sets Subscription.TurnOnAutoRenew__c to No for the use cases listed above.

GitLab Docs for SaaS (public)

GitLab Docs for Self-managed (public)

Other public docs

Developer docs

Quarterly Subscription Reconciliation (QSR)

See public QSR documentation.

QSR eligibility

In addition to documented elibiligy cases, we exclude from QSRs any subscription where the Account has any of the following settings in Zuora:

  1. Account.PO Required = Yes (customer notifies GitLab they have a “no PO, no Pay policy”, booking requirement and pre-billing).
  2. Account.Portal Required = Yes (customer notifies GitLab that they require invoices to be manually uploaded to a billing portal, and includes non-PO, PO, contract, or SOW).
  3. Account.Support Hold = Yes (customers are placed on support hold when accounts become >90 days past due without payment commitment).
  4. Account.Credit Hold = Yes (customers are placed on credit hold when any balance is written off to bad debt)

There’s an automated process (Zuora Workflow) that sets Subscription.TurnOnSeatReconciliation__c to No for the use cases listed above.

QSR Process
  1. When a new subscription is purchased or an existing subscription renewed, it is opted into Quarterly Reconciliation.
    1. Subscription.TurnOnSeatReconciliation__c variable is set to Yes.
    2. Subscription.ContractSeatReconciliation__c variable is set to Yes.
  2. Usage data is gathered daily via Cloud Licensing (SM/Dedicated) of the namespace API (gitlab.com)

Other details available in QSR invoicing and payment docs.

How individual automated reconciliation works:

This functionality lives in Customers Portal and runs daily at midnight UTC. Please note that this process is shifted by 6 days for Self-Managed subscriptions, so that we have enough time to collect seat usage data from the instance.

  1. Find all subscriptions where TurnOnSeatReconciliation__c is equal to Yes.
  2. Calculate overage by checking what the Max User count was over the previous quarter.
  3. Store the seat overage, preview and store the invoice amount against Zuora.
    1. Send an email to the customer with the exact overage quantity and invoice amount they can expect to pay (subject: “Important information about your GitLab subscription”).
    2. Copy this email to SFDC, and display under the Contact Activity.
  4. Create an Open SFDC Opportunity, store that OpportunityId on the Reconciliation record.
  5. 7 days later, create an amendment in Zuora to add additional seats at Effective Price. The new seat count is effective at the end of the quarter and through the end of Subscription Term (no historical chargeback for overage).
    1. Amendment Name is set to Automated seat reconciliation.
  6. Generate an invoice and apply payment.
    1. If payment fails, or no payment method is on file, reconciliation doesn’t happen. Email is sent (subject: “Your GitLab subscription failed to reconcile”). Copy this email to SFDC, and display under the Contact Activity.
    2. For Sales Assisted customers, an invoice is generated and sent for payment (from Zuora). Account specific payment terms apply.
  7. Send an email with the Receipt from Zuora (via a scheduled Zuora Workflow).
  8. Send an email that reconciliation has occurred, include provisioning instructions (subject: “Your GitLab subscription has been reconciled”). This email is copied to SFDC and displayed under Contact Activity.
  9. Additional seats are provisioned.
    1. For SaaS customers, provision additional seats immediately.
    2. For Self-managed customers, provision additional seats in the next instance sync (24 hrs), or customer can trigger the update from within their instance.
  10. Update SFDC Opportunity to Closed Won, and created related SFDC Quote and Quote objects.
  11. If reconciliation fails for any reason, SFDC Opportunity remains open.
QSR and SFDC Opportunities

As of 2023-05-22, SFDC Opportunities created for QSR have 2 new fields populated: QSR Status and QSR Notes. Here’s a summary of what you can expect to see in these fields and suggested action for Sales Reps.

QSR Status QSR Notes Stage Suggestion Action Additional Notes
Pending Reconciliation record link (e.g.cust….gitlab.com/admin/r../12345) 6-Awaiting Signature No action The QSR will be auto reconciled within 7 days.
Processed Reconciliation record link (e.g.cust….gitlab.com/admin/r../12345) Closed Won No action
Failed Failed to amend subscription/ amount does not match latest preview 6-Awaiting Signature AE to set to Closed Lost. The QSR has become redundant, since the customer purchased additional seats after the QSR has already been created.
Failed multiple_rate_plans 6-Awaiting Signature AE to contact customer, advising that extra seats must be purchased. QSR cannot be processed as the customer has multiple rate plans on the subscription.
Failed - card was declined
- card does not support this type of purchase
- card number is incorrect
- expiration year is invalid
- expiration month is invalid
- has insufficient funds, or any other payment_declined/ transaction declined error.		 6-Awaiting Signature Optional: AE to contact customer. Customer will receive a notification that their card was declined, together with the steps they need to take to resolve. Once the customer updates their payment method, QSR will be re-processed.
FAQs
  1. How do I see the status of QSRs?
    1. Log in to Customers Portal Admin, and navigate to Reconciliations section.
    2. Input subscription name (i.e. “A-S00039268”) in the filter box, and do a search.
    3. This will display all of the reconciliation records for that subscription, and you’ll be able to see each of their statuses.
  2. Customer is enrolled in QSR, but no reconciliations have been performed..
    1. QSR could have been skipped for various reasons, including declined payment. Please follow the instructions in point 1 for looking up the QSR status.
  3. Customer is enrolled in QSR, but reconciliation has been skipped with reconciliations_disabled reason code.
    1. Customer’s Self-Managed instance must be activated with Cloud License. This will enable seat usage collection, so that we can perform the reconciliation.
  4. Customer is on EOA or another plan at a discounted per-seat price. Will their QSR amendment be based on the discounted/effective or list price?
    1. QSR Amendment for additional seats will be based on the effective price.
  5. Does QSR respect the EOA business rule of 25 maximum seats at a discounted price?
    1. Kind of - we will skip the QSR if we try to amend EOA-type subscription for more than 25 seats. Click here to see a list of all QSRs that errored because of this rule.
Additional documentation

Subscription Display

  1. For sales assisted subscriptions, there could be cases wherein a single subscription term has multiple plans (e.g. premium, ultimate). This could be because the subscription was sold with a plan and mid-term the plan was changed to another one. In our new subscription card design, in such cases only the latest version of the subscription will be shown and the details of the old plan will not be shown. The start date of the new plan should be shown correctly as starting from the date from which the new plan is active. More details in this issue (internal).

CustomersDot Admin Panel

The target audience is the internal GitLab team, and covers the admin panel of the Customers Portal. Customers or subscription managers should refer to the Customers section of GitLab’s user documentation for help in using the portal, or the licensing FAQ for questions on subscriptions such as how users are counted.

Log in

File an access request for customers.gitlab.com/admin/ (example access request) to get access.

Once access is granted, either go to customers.gitlab.com/admin/ and click “Sign in with Okta” or go to your Okta App and look for the Customers Portal App.

Searching

When using the admin panel search, be aware that results will be based on searching only one field at a time. For example, entering a person’s full name will likely provide no results because the system will not search first and last name at the same time, only one or the other.

We recommend searching by email address, partial email address (e.g. company domain), or company name. When searching by name, enter only first or last name.

After your initial search, you can further filter the search results.

In the search results, any account which has a subscription tied to it will have a “Subscription” badge next to their name.

Customers

Search for a customer

  1. Navigate to Customers in the admin panel.
  2. Enter details of a customer to search for in the empty text box. (E.g. email address or domain of the customer).
  3. Click on Refresh or hit Enter on your keyboard to initiate the search.
  4. You can refine your current search by clicking on Add filter.
  5. Select one or more additional filters that should be applied.
  6. Click on Refresh again.

Update customer details

Note: The updated customer details are synced to the matching Zuora BillTo/SoldTo contact.

  1. Select the correct customer by clicking on the ✎ icon in the Customers section.
  2. You can now update First name, Last name, and Email.
  3. Click on Save.

Deactivate login for Customer

If you want to update the physical address of the customer or other details, you need to impersonate the customer.

  1. In the desired customer’s detail view, click on Impersonate.
  2. You are now get redirected to impersonate the user.
  3. Follow the user documentation on updating details.

Deactivate login for a customer

  1. Select the correct customer by clicking on the ✎ icon in the Customers section.
  2. Untick Login activated
  3. Click on Save.

The customer is now blocked from accessing their Customers Portal account.

Note: That does not affect the ability to access their GitLab.com account.

See all Zuora subscriptions of a customer

  1. In the desired customer’s detail view, click on Zuora Subscriptions.
  2. You will see a list of all Zuora subscriptions for this customer including:
    • Name of the subscription
    • Type (SaaS or SM)
    • Start date
    • End date
    • Owed seats
    • Cloud Licensing turned on or off
    • Operational Metrics turned on or off
    • Quaterly Coterms turned on or off
    • Auto Renew turned on or off

Note: Owed seat = Max seats used - seats in subscription.

View history of customer account changes

  1. In the desired customer’s detail view, click on History.
  2. You will see a list of all events and logs that happened to the customer record.

Note: If a user is admin:xyz@gitlab.com in a log line, that indicates a change on the customer’s record that was done via the admin panel.

One-time sign-in url

With the one-time sign in url a customer is able to directly sign in to their Customers Portal account. This works for customers that have or don’t have a GitLab.com account linked to their Customers Portal account.

  1. Select the correct customer by clicking on the ℹ️ icon in the Customers section.
  2. Scroll down and copy the link under One time sign in url.
  3. Share the link with the authorized customer.

Note: A new one-time sign-in link will be generated after the previous one has been used. The one-time sign in url does not log the customer into their GitLab.com account, only their Customers Portal account.

GitLab Groups

If a customer has a connected GitLab.com user account, then a list of namespaces will show with relevant information including current plan.

Note: This only works as long as the customer’s access_token is valid.

The list of namespaces are:

  • personal namespace
  • top level group namespaces where user is Owner

Billing Accounts

The billing account is the representation of a billing entity which is mostly connected to an organization. The billing account has data associated to Zuora, SFDC, important company information and all billing account memberships.

Search for a billing account

  1. Navigate to Billing accounts in the admin panel.
  2. Enter details of a billing account to search for in the empty text box. (E.g. name).
  3. Click on Refresh or hit Enter on your keyboard to initiate the search.
  4. You can refine your current search by clicking on Add filter.
  5. Select one or more additional filters that should be applied.
  6. Click on Refresh again.

View history of billing account changes

  1. In the desired billing account’s detail view, click on History.
  2. You will see a list of all events and logs that happened to the billing account.

See the Bill_To and Sold_To contact of a billing account

  1. Navigate to the desired billing account’s detail view.
  2. Under ℹ️ Show you will find the Bill_To and Sold_To contact.
  3. Click on the desired contact if you want to find more information about it.

Note: There can only be one Bill_To and one Sold_To contact associated to a billing account. They can be the same contact.

See all invoices of a billing account

  1. In the desired billing account’s detail view, click on List Invoices.
  2. You will see a list of all invoices for that billing account including:
    • ID
    • Date
    • Amount
    • Payment status
    • Balance
    • Due date

Note: This view is also accessible for CDot admins with read only permissions.

See all payment methods on file for a billing account

  1. In the desired billing account’s detail view, click on List Payment Methods.
  2. You will see a list of all payment methods on file for that billing account including:

    • Credit card:

      • Ending in
      • Card type
      • Name on card
      • Expiration date

    • ACH:

      • Routing Number
      • Account Number
      • Account Type
      • Bank Name
      • Account Name

Note: This view is also accessible for CDot admins with read only permissions.

See all Zuora subscriptions of a billing account

  1. In the desired billing account’s detail view, click on Zuora Subscriptions.
  2. You will see a list of all Zuora subscriptions for this billing account including:
    • Name of the subscription
    • Type (SaaS or SM)
    • Start date
    • End date
    • Owed seats
    • Cloud Licensing turned on or off
    • Operational Metrics turned on or off
    • Quaterly Coterms turned on or off
    • Auto Renew turned on or off

Note: Owed seat = Max seats used - seats in subscription.

Billing Account Contacts

The billing account contact represents the billing account’s contact details that are used to send invoices, notices, etc. Other information such as location based data is used for tax related calculations. A contact can be a Bill_To or a Sold_To contact (or the same if applied that way).

There can only be one Bill_To and one Sold_To contact for a billing account. It is possible to use the same contact information (e.g. email address) over multiple billing accounts.

Search for a billing account contact

  1. Navigate to Billing account contacts in the admin panel.
  2. Enter details of a billing account contact to search for in the empty text box. (E.g. name, email).
  3. Click on Refresh or hit Enter on your keyboard to initiate the search.
  4. You can refine your current search by clicking on Add filter.
  5. Select one or more additional filters that should be applied.
  6. Click on Refresh again.

Update an existing billing account contact

  1. Navigate to the Billing account contacts section.
  2. Search for the needed billing account contact (e.g. using email address).
  3. Select the proper billing account contact and click on Edit.
  4. You can now choose to update:
    • First name
    • Last name
    • Work email
    • Address 1
    • Address 2
    • Country
    • State
    • City
    • Postal code
  5. Click Save.
  6. The changes will be synced back to the corresponding Zuora contact immediately.

Add new billing account contact to CustomersDot

If a Zuora contact is not available in CustomersDot, but in Zuora, the contact can be added through the admin panel.

  1. Navigate to the Billing account contacts section.
  2. Click on + Add New.
  3. Provide the Zuora contact ID.
  4. Click on Save.

This will create a contact record in CustomersDot that is in sync with Zuora. This directly assigns all the billing account contact attributes from Zuora to the created contact.

Note: It is possible that a contact doesn’t have a Billing account attached in CustomersDot (e.g. if it does not exist in Customers Portal).

View history of billing account contact changes

  1. In the desired billing account contact’s detail view, click on History.
  2. You will see a list of all events and logs that happened to the billing account contact.

Billing Acccount Memberships

The billing account membership defines the relation between a customer and a billing account. The customer will be able to see the subscription in their Customers Portal account if there is a billing account membership with an active subscription.

Currently a customer can only have one billing account membership.

Add a new billing account membership

Adding a new billing account membership between a customer and a billing account results in the customer becoming a subscription management contact.

  1. Navigate to the Billing account memberships section.
  2. Select the + Add new action.
  3. Select the proper customer and CustomersDot billing account for the new subscription management request.
  4. Click Save.

Note: We display the Zuora account name and Zuora account ID (in brackets) in the list of billing accounts.

Delete the billing account membership of a customer

  1. Navigate to the Billing account memberships section.
  2. Open the desired billing account membership and select x Delete action.
  3. Confirm the correct billing account membership was selected.
  4. Select Yes, I'm sure.
  5. See the Billing account membership successfully deleted success notification.

Trials

Check, change, or extend trial expiry date

  1. Find the customer who initiated the trial.
  2. Click on the GitLab Groups.
  3. If the trial is expired and needs to be extended, click on the Renew Trial button.
  4. Change the trial date as necessary and click on Update. Warning: Do not change the date to a date prior to today’s date in UTC timezone.

Licenses

  1. Navigate to the Licenses section.
  2. From this page, you can:
    • View the list of most recently generated licenses
    • Search for a license by name
  3. Scroll to the right and click on ℹ️ icon to show details of a license.

The details of a license contains the following information:

  • Type: Cloud, offline cloud or legacy license.
  • Trial: Displays if it’s a trial license or not.
  • Name
  • Company
  • Email
  • Issued at, starts at and expires at
  • User count
  • Zuora subscription name and link
  • GitLab plan

Find Usage Data For a Customer By License Lookup

The following process allows you to view Service Ping usage data for all servers with a given license installed.

  1. Navigate to the Licenses section.

  2. Search for the customer using the search box (Make sure you are searching for the name as it is in Salesforce).

  3. All licenses for the customer will be returned, use the issued and expiry dates to determine which is the active license.

  4. Scroll to the right and click on ℹ️ icon to show details of a license

  5. Click on Lookup hostnames under Hostnames with this license at the bottom of the screen. This will open version.gitlab.com

    • version.gitlab.com does not yet support Okta so you will login with your GitLab account.

  6. You will see one row for each server that has returned usage data and has this license installed. Look at the Usage Ping Last Checked On column to determine which entries contain recent usage ping data.

  7. Click on the server name to load the usage ping details.

This video tutorial walks through an example of how to find the license details for a particular customer.

The License seat links page in CustomersDot provides visibility into current usage and version data for Self Managed customers on Cloud Licensing or Offline Cloud Licensing. One record is created for each data sync, representing point-in-time data that can help to show changes in usage over time or the date that a customer exceeded a certain seat count. For Cloud License enabled customers, a record will be created once per day as part of License Sync. For Offline License enabled customers, a record is created whenever the customer manually submits their usage data to GitLab, which is requested at a cadence of once per month.

On this page, you can search by Company, Subscription name, or Hostname to see all license usage for a specific customer. The following metrics are reported with each sync:

  1. License user count - the number of seats purchased as part of the customer’s subscription
  2. Billlable user count - the current count of active, billable users at the time of the sync
  3. Max historical user count - the highest value of billable users recorded during the current subscription term
  4. GitLab version - the version of GitLab at time the customer is on at time of sync

Orders

  1. Navigate to the Orders section.
  2. Search for the order using the search box. You can use the following parameter for your search:
    • Order ID
    • Billing account
    • Subscription name
    • Gl namespace
    • Gl namespace name
  3. Click on the ℹ️ icon on the right to show all details of an order.
  4. Click on the 📕 icon on the right to see the history of an order.

Reconciliations

  1. Navigate to the Reconciliations section.
  2. Search for the customer using the search box (Make sure you are searching for the name as it is in Salesforce).
  3. Any reconciliations for the customer will be returned, and the following information:
    • Customer name
    • Subscription name with link to Zuora
    • Reconciliation status
    • Reconciliation date
    • Reconciliation finished/done date
    • Skip reason (if applicable)
    • User count (after reconciliation)
    • Invoiced amount
    • Error message (if applicable)

Sales use cases of CustomersDot Admin panel

Lookup all issued licenses for a customer/prospect

It provides an understanding of who and how many trials they have requested, when, and for how many users. Self-Requested Trials are not easily reported.

Cross-reference a license with version.gitlab.com

It’s the only way to search for usage ping data if the server name is not known. For example a customer acmeinc.com uses acmeinc.ninja. There is no straightforward way to find this.

Quickly find which email address was used to deliver a license

It is important to know who received the license for further troubleshooting as CustomersDot is the SSOT for license information.

References

Action plan for Fulfillment-impacting bugs

If a bug is discovered that impacts Fulfillment, including provisioning, purchasing, billing, subscription data, etc., please do the following:

Reporting the issue

  1. Open a new Fulfillment Meta bug intake issue (select the bug_intake template) outlining what is known about the bug.
    1. Tag Fulfillment Product Management by mentioning the @fulfillment-group/leadership/fulfillment-pm group.
    2. Assign the issue to ofernandez2 for review and action.
  2. Post the link to the issue on Slack in #s_fulfillment and in #business-fulfillment-sync for broad awareness and review.

Notifying appropriate DRIs

The following individuals should be looped into the issue, depending on the impact of the bug:

  1. For billing and revenue-impacting issues: Sarah McCauley - Director, Billing & AR
  2. To determine impacted subscriptions and/or automation of Zuora solutions: Jessica Salcido - Finance Systems Administrator
  3. For bookings impact, and/or to assess and coordinate Salesforce solution needs: Jesse Rabbits - Sr. Manager, Deal Desk
  4. If customer outreach is needed, PM should work with: Lyle Kozloff - Director of Support, Global Readiness
  5. For product monetization decisions needed: Justin Farris - Sr. Dir, Product Monetization

Fulfillment debugging and FAQ

License Activation issues

License won’t activate due to a true-up or seat overage mismatch

  1. For customers on 14.3+ we allow activating a license even if there’s a 10% seat overage issue #333851. You can learn more about this here and see the associated MR #67507 and MR #67508
  2. With Cloud Licensing, we won’t block activation due to mismatch seats. If a customer applies a license with less seats than their currently active users, we will reconcile it in their following QSR or true-up event.

What type of connection does the GitLab instance require to activate Cloud Licensing?

The instance would need to have a 443 port connection to customers.gitlab.com in order to activate. This is also used for license synchronization as outlined in our documentation here.

Data collection

Can customers opt out of telemetry or sharing license sync data?

The data transmitted with Cloud License is covered in this documentation. In short, it’s aggregate user counts and some license metadata. This data is required for Cloud Licensing. It’s intended to only include necessary data to support our needs for administering a license, supporting future renewals, supporting add-ons, and any seat reconciliations.

You can look at sample code that generates the counts by searching for subscription events in metrics.gitlab.com.

What is Operational vs Optional Data?

Our service usage data primarily aggregate counts from your instance (e.g. counts of issues or MRs) and is sent to GitLab on a weekly (or slower) cadence.

  1. Operational Data: This is the data that is tied to your subscription account/license. Our goal with this data is to capture aggregate counts to help the GitLab Customer Success and Sales teams help customers better adopt GitLab and get value out of their investment. Those counters can be viewed on metrics.gitlab.com by searching for “operational” and looking for the operational category. These operational events are agnostic of how you’ve activated your instance.
  2. Optional Data: Optional Data is a similar type of metric (aggregate counts) but a much larger set than the Operational metrics. This is configured/opted-out by you, in your instance, and has nothing to do with your subscription. If you choose to share that data our Product teams would appreciate the insights to understand where to invest R&D resources to continue to mature our platform. Otherwise, you can ignore for your renewal and follow the opt-out steps documented here.

Can a customer send subscription data ad-hoc, while keeping their GitLab instance airgapped/not connected to the internet?

Please see Offline Cloud Licensing for more information.

Fulfillment Roadmap Prioritization

Principles

Across our stable counterparts, we follow four key principles to keep us focused on delivering the right results. These principles are not absolute, the intent is for them to guide our decision-making.

Make conducting business with GitLab seamless

When customers choose to purchase GitLab they’ve already decided to unlock additional value by accessing the features or services enabled by a transaction. We strive to make the transaction experiences fade into the background, helping customers unlock this additional value as easily as possible. This creates a better customer experience and results in accelerated growth for GitLab.

This means that in every initiative we question the need for complexity. We strive to build functionality that is easy to understand and use, and make sure it works flawlessly for customers of all types. As much as we can, we won’t require a customer to speak to a sales representative and will allow them to choose whether to transact via online self-service tools.

Build a strong foundation so GitLab can scale

Fulfillment systems are the foundational layer for many commerce activities within GitLab. Our systems provision licenses for customers, are the source of data for multiple KPIs and data models, and interact directly with Zuora and Salesforce. These systems need to be reliable, scale with demand, and allow other teams to collaborate.

We regularly invest in our foundations and will continue to pause new feature development in favor of foundations whenever we feel that our foundational systems aren’t robust enough. We established a Fulfillment Platform group in FY23 for focused efforts in this area.

Use data to make decisions and measure impact

We have many sensing mechanisms at our disposal: feedback routed via our GTM teams, meetings with business counterparts, customer feedback from user research, and improvement suggestions raised by GitLab team members and members of the wider community in our issue tracker.

We’re also improving how we use data as a sensing mechanism to set direction and prioritization. Understanding our funnel is paramount in building a seamless commerce experience for our customers. Fulfillment teams in collaboration with Growth are instrumenting each point in our transaction funnels so we can use data to inform our strategy and direction.

Iterate, especially when the impact of a change is sizeable

Iteration is one of the most challenging values to follow, especially within Fulfillment. Oftentimes our work needs to be bundled and aligned closely with external announcements or communications. Even so, we strive to break work down as much as possible and decouple functionality releases from broader announcements. Doing this expedites delivering value to our customers and the business.

Minimize and remove business logic from the GitLab application code

In the past, we have embedded significant business logic into the GitLab instance code directly. For example, we have logic in our licensing system that checks at the instance level whether the customer license should be activated based on licenses paid for, etc. This causes significant issues as we evolve our business policies, which we can’t then reflect in past GitLab versions that we support.

We will minimize such logic and remove it from the application code whenever possible, seeking alternative solutions.

Prioritization Process

Our roadmap is prioritized and scheduled following our Project management process. We aim to update this roadmap every month as a part of our milestone planning process.

To request work to be added to the Fulfillment roadmap, please follow our intake request process. Changes in priorities of this roadmap follow our prioritization process.

The source of truth for our priorities for a given quarter are our Fulfillment OKRs.

By nature of our direction, Fulfillment works mostly on highly cross-functional projects where either or both of the following are true:

  1. Many cross-team dependencies: project execution relies on collaboration with other teams, with significant coordination of time and resources required.
  2. Downstream impacts: projects may change how other teams operate (e.g., Field Operations, Enterprise Apps, Billing) and may also impact the success of their efforts (e.g., achieving sales efficiency targets, accomplishing e-commerce conversion goals)

To focus on the most impactful work, Fulfillment’s prioritization process seeks to:

  1. Prioritize the highest ROI initiatives as measured by long-term impact on GitLab, Inc’s value. (Note: “cost to build” is a key consideration in the I of the ROI calculation)
  2. Provide future visibility into priorities to adequately plan cross-team and cross-functional resource needs.
  3. Minimize waste and churn due to re-prioritization mid-execution.

Prioritization Criteria

A project will be prioritized in the Fulfillment roadmap based on the considerations below.

  1. Revenue impact potential
    1. Value of unlocking new sales channels
    2. Sales efficiency improvements and reduction in time spent by a field team member to close a deal, this includes eliminating sales team involvement on most transactions
    3. Conversion improvements
    4. Risks and compliance issues (negative revenue potential)
  2. Operational cost reduction
    1. Reduction in support costs
    2. Seamless transactions with GitLab, efficiency gains, and improved customer satisfaction.
  3. Foundations to unlock opportunities
    1. Value of new or improved data to inform future opportunities
    2. System robustness to support 10x customers
    3. Value of the foundational work to unlock other opportunities
    4. Number of GitLab team members able to contribute towards e-commerce improvements
    5. Work that will help us scale (support more customers, improve operations, simplify business processes, etc.)
  4. Confidence level around the impact and solution
    1. Low for initiatives that haven’t been properly scoped or researched. PM/UX/Eng and cross-functional partners will increase the confidence by scoping the initiative.
  5. Ease of implementation
    1. Consider the time and resources required to complete the initiative.
    2. Consider a solution that is long-term sustainable, and corresponds to the revenue/cost impact estimated.
    3. For efforts that are not well understood, we will start by assuming a larger effort to account for unknowns. As we do some scoping, we can refine the cost/complexity.

All initiatives, regardless of who requests them, will be evaluated based on this same criteria.

Some initiatives will have a direct impact on these criteria, but others will have an indirect impact. We will consider indirect impact as part of the prioritization.

When scoping new solutions we will prefer those that best allow GitLab to scale and accelerate future work. These solutions often require more upfront foundational work, which we will include in the initial scope. In cases when we decide to accelerate a solution by skipping on some foundational work, we will add this foundational work as a separate line item to the roadmap.

A note on Customer Satisfaction: to understand the impact of efforts aimed at improving customer satisfaction, we should estimate the indirect impact of improving CSAT on revenue and cost. For example, by reducing the number of steps or improving the steps required to purchase we will see an increase in conversion rate and thus revenue.

Scheduling new work

Prioritization based on the established criteria will drive the order in which work is scheduled to be completed. The product team will review overall prioritization regularly. Before changing priorities, will consider:

  1. Efficiency and morale impact of disrupting ongoing efforts
  2. Impact of changes to existing customer and partner commitments
  3. Feedback from cross-functional partners

To minimize impact and give more predictability to partner teams, we will minimize changes to initiatives that we’ve already agreed with cross-functional partners to do within the ongoing quarter.

Anyone can request new items to be added to the roadmap via an intake request.

Quarterly cross-functional review

One of our prioritization goals is to maximize overall team output across Fulfillment and cross-functional partners. We want to give transparency to all GitLab team members about the work that Fulfillment and its partner teams plan to deliver.

To enable this, we will do a roadmap review with our stable counterparts before the beginning of a new fiscal quarter. As part of this review, we gather feedback on roadmap priorities, update the roadmap based on the feedback, and agree with partners on the scope and delivery milestones for the upcoming 3-6 months.

During these quarterly reviews we will aim to commit up to 70% of Fulfillment’s engineering capacity for the upcoming quarter, and no more than 30% of capacity for the quarter after. This is meant to provide enough visibility into upcoming activities for cross-functional partners to plan for them while leaving room for reprioritization and changes as needed.

Communicating roadmap changes

Any proposed changes to the roadmap will be first communicated to cross-functional partners async in a relevant Slack channel with the relevant context and rationale, and ask for feedback. As needed, a synchronous meeting will be scheduled to discuss. All feedback will be considered by the product team and a final decision will be made and communicated once made.

Fulfillment Prioritization Escalations

If you have an urgent Fulfillment need that is not being prioritized by Fulfillment’s regular prioritization process due to competing priorities, and it is both important and urgent, please work with your division’s leadership for escalation. The first step can be an async discussion involving Fulfillment leadership (as of now include ofernandez2). Situations in which competing company-priority projects would need to be reprioritized to accommodate your request may require escalation to GitLab’s e-group.

Team members in our Sales and Customer Success groups should escalate first via the Top ARR Drivers meeting for cross-team leadership visibility and prioritization. Simply add your item to the list of asks (link in the meeting agenda) for discussion.

Fulfillment OKR processes

Fulfillment resourcing is allocated to work on top priority work, which is generally managed by:

  1. First ensure that forced prioritization items (such as meeting SLOs) are completed timely.
  2. Deliver on quarterly objective and key results (OKRs).

Fulfillment FY25 Q2 OKRs are listed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-OKRs/-/work_items/6895 (team member access only). We have a similar top-level objective for the Fulfillment Stage each quarter.

Setting OKRs:

  1. Each quarter the Fulfillment Stage product leader kicks off OKR planning by starting a top-level objective in GitLab OKRs with a draft list of top priorities.
  2. Quads for each Fulfillment group work together to plan their quarterly work and add sub-objectives/KRs to map to those top priorities.
  3. Quads suggest changes to OKRs based on what they are seeing during planning. This includes prioritizing tech debt, architecture blueprints, maintenance KRs, or any other work that may be missing from OKRs.
  4. We label all sub-objectives or KRs using priority labels. We strive for 90%+ accomplishment on Priority 1, 80%+ on Priority 2 items, and 70%+ on Priority 3 items.

Reviewing OKRs:

  1. Monthly updates to OKRs as part of what used to be the PI review meeting (example issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/Product/-/issues/13333)
  2. We make sure that KRs are up to date, including closing out and replacing OKRs when appropriate (e.g., we had a placeholder OKR that we decided not to pursue, or we decided to do a mid-quarter change to prioritize something else).
  3. If everyone gets their updates in 2 days ahead of the PI review meeting, and there are no open discussion points after async review, we cancel the PI sync meeting.
  4. Our agenda doc is updated each month, though, as we review async to ensure that all things that need conversation are discussed async. (agenda doc)

Finalizing and closing OKRs:

At the end of the quarter, stage leaders score the OKRs and leave a comment in the top level objective summarizing it. (FY25 Q1 example). This final step is critical since it helps us reflect and hold ourselves accountable, as well as celebrate what we accomplished which otherwise often goes unnoticed. We cross-post this last update to Slack for more visibility in our #s_fulfillment_fyi channel.

Last modified November 8, 2024: Update file fulfillment-guide.md to include newly added support functionality in CDot Admin view (32843f9c)
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