Tools and Resources

Reference index of tools, platforms, and resources used by Solutions Architects

Tools and Resources

This page is a grouped reference index of tools, platforms, and resources used by Solutions Architects. For end-to-end engagement guides, see SA Engagement Playbooks. For mandatory process steps, see SA Processes.

Demo and Presentation Tools

GitLab Solutions Architects conduct hands-on workshops as interactive events for GitLab prospects and customers to learn the GitLab product and DevSecOps capabilities. Workshops may be executed as marketing events or run independently for specific customers. Detail information is provided on the Hands-on Workshops page.

Customer Engagement and Recording

When Support is required during the pre-sales cycle—for example, during a POV exercise or when pursuing a potential new deal with an existing customer Solutions Architects should use the Support Super Form named “Allows Solution Architects to request assistance from Support Team”.

For all other situations with existing customers, Solutions Architects should advise the customer to open a support ticket themselves.

If a ticket later becomes a priority, the assigned Support Engineer can escalate it to the responsible backend engineering team through a GitLab Request for Help (RFH) issue. In exceptional circumstances such as a blocker that could prevent closing business, Solutions Architects may raise an RFH issue directly. If doing so, please ensure you carefully follow the documented process in the RFH README and, when closing the issue, apply the correct closure label to align with reporting requirements.

Data Seeding and Demo Environments

When SAs discover bugs or customer-blocking issues during DAP trials, POVs, or customer deployments, use the DAP Rapid field reporting process to route them to engineering with appropriate severity and tracking labels. SAs can file bugs directly — no Zendesk ticket required.

SaaS Trials for Existing Customers

Paid customers must set up a new namespace on SaaS when trialing Ultimate. There are two primary reasons for this:

  1. Some paid features are not available in a trial, so a customer might lose functionality they had been using if a trial license is applied
  2. GitLab does not have an appropriate mechanism for applying and reverting a trial license on SaaS without the namespace potentially being reverted to free when the trial expires (see issue)

Both situations put customer production GitLab usage at risk if a trial is applied to the SaaS namespace.

Instead, a customer should create a new namespace and trial there. We have put together some trial guidelines in order to make the process as seamless as possible for customers.

Learning Platforms

As a Solutions Architect, it is important to be continuously learning more about our product and related industry topics. The education and enablement handbook page provides a dashboard of aggregated resources that we encourage you to use to get up to speed.

SFDC and Rattle Hygiene

Stack Overflow for Teams is a knowledge sharing and collaboration tool that helps many organizations at GitLab, including the SA org, stay productive, onboard faster, and minimize distractions by unlocking information through collaborative knowledge management.

Please refer to the Stack Overflow resource page to understand how Stack Overflow is utilized by the SA, CS, and SMB orgs.

Stack Overflow for Teams

Stack Overflow for Teams is a knowledge sharing and collaboration tool that helps many organizations at GitLab, including the SA org, stay productive, onboard faster, and minimize distractions by unlocking information through collaborative knowledge management.

Please refer to the Stack Overflow resource page to understand how Stack Overflow is utilized by the SA, CS, and SMB orgs.

Product Releases

Solutions Architects have to keep up the pace of the GitLab monthly product releases to position feature sets and capabilities for the prospect and customer needs while demonstrating the market leading position.

Following links provide product release information to assist in technical discussions and technical evaluation.

Customer Facing Meeting Tools

Solutions Architects frequently interact with customers for demos, presentations or Q&A. These calls should enable the customer to clearly experience the value of GitLab without distraction or interruption. The below list of tools was compiled by the GitLab SA team as commonly used solutions. Note, this list does not represent a requirement to use any of these products or an endorsement for these products.

  • Muzzle to mute all notifications prior to beginning a call
  • Tab Resize Chrome plugin to break tabs into split-screen viewing
  • Screenbrush to draw on the screen
  • Toby or Tabs Outliner to launch many preset tabs at once
  • Station to group pages by application in a smart dock
  • MouseBeam enables the mouse cursor to use multiple screens like a circle
  • Rectangle to quickly move and resize windows in macOS using keyboard shortcuts or snap areas
  • Dark Reader enables browser dark mode to better fit room lighting
  • Postman for API interaction
  • VSCodium open-source IDE preferred by some SAs for demos and development
  • Visual Studio Code lightweight IDE text editor

Useful Customer Facing Presentations

No two presentations are the same and we often find ourselves mixing and matching content tailored to our Customer’s journey. All field and customer facing collateral is hosted on

O’Reilly Learning Platform

In order to facilitate an environment of learning and development, the Solutions Architect team has access to the O’Reilly Learning Platform. This education platform contains thousands of books, videos and live learning courses to assist SA’s with gaining the knowledge they need to stay competitive.

More information can be found on the Customer Success Education & Enablement page.

LinkedIn Learning Platform

LinkedIn Learning is another platform with various resources to help SA’s during their onboarding journeys.

Getting started as an associate SA

Here are courses that will facilitate the onboarding process of associate SAs and help them in getting up to speed with the technical concepts required for the role:

Free for GitLab members

Paid Paid courses can be expensed as part of the Growth and Development benefits

Data Seeding (Demo Data)

The GitLab Data Seeder is a tool that Solutions Architects can use to showcase to customers “what good data looks like” in GitLab. The data that is generated is customizable, time-relative, and can be used on-demand to generate data to demonstrate.

The Demo Data can be showcased on any self-managed instance including Docker, GDK, and customer environments.

Diagramming Tools

Being able to diagram as-is and to-be workflows and architectures is a key tactic for Solutions Architects to communicate key benefits of a GitLab DevSecOps transformation. GitLab has made FigJam available for SAs to use and we have Solutions Architecture Workspace available for storing our diagrams.

DAP Rapid — Field Issue Reporting
How Solutions Architects report customer-blocking DAP issues to engineering
GitLab Trial Guidelines
GitLab Trial Guidelines
Hands-on Workshop
Hands-on Workshop
Stack Overflow for Teams
Stack Overflow for Teams
Last modified May 8, 2026: Restructure SA Handbook: Separate Processes, Practices, Playbooks, and Tools (1fce460c)
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