Support Glossary

See “AMER” in List of country groupings on Wikipedia.

Asia-Pacific on Wikipedia.

Experimental: AMER is exploring a metric called Active Queue Carry, which is the sum of tickets currently assigned to an engineer that are open, pending, solved, and on-hold. Tickets stay in a solved state for 7 days, so Active Queue Carry represents the most recent solved work.

See ARR in Sales Term Glossary.

Customers can subscribe to our assigned support engineer service which allocates them a named support engineer. You can read more about this role in the handbook.

See Batched Background Migration docs page.

How to Perform Customer Emergencies Duties

In the support context, customer effort score is an approach to measuring customer satisfaction. In the wider GitLab context, we also have candidate experience specialists who are part of our recruiting team.

Support is responsible for keeping customers informed in support of our incident response process when there is an active incident on gitlab.com. The role has several responsibilities.

CSMs are accountable for customer adoption, measurable outcomes, customer satisfaction, and creating true customer advocacy. You can read more here

A security testing method that tests running applications for security flaws by simulating attacks.

Directly responsible individuals at GitLab own particular projects, initiatives, or activity.

Europe, the Middle East and Africa on Wikipedia.

Support have a first response time Service Level Agreement (SLA) on all new tickets from subscribed customers.

A toolkit provided by GitLab for setting up and managing GitLab environments. GET helps with deployment and configuration of GitLab instances.

Google’s managed Kubernetes service that provides a hosted Kubernetes environment. GKE simplifies cluster management and integrates with other Google Cloud services.

A reference to production environments or services running on Google Cloud Platform.

A system design approach that ensures a service remains operational and accessible even when individual components fail. HA systems minimize downtime and maintain service continuity.

A compact format for transferring claims between any two parties. JWTs are commonly used for authentication and information exchange in web applications.

Abbreviated as k8s (k + 8 letters + s), Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that manages Docker containers across multiple servers.

A repository of solutions to commonly-encountered problems, created and maintained by Support Engineers. May also be used to refer to individual articles.

An industry standard for indetifying, creating, and updating articles within a knowledge base. Official documentation.

An industry-standard protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services. Commonly used for authentication and authorization in enterprise environments.

A commonly used industry term.

A measurement of the average time it takes for a ticket to progress from creation to solved.

Minimal valuable change was previously referred to as the minimal viable change. This language was updated 2024-07-31.

Support have a next response time Service Level Objective (SLO) on all subsequent replies to tickets from subscribed customers.

GitLab uses OKRs to support achieving our strategic goals.

See How Support On-call works for more information about how GitLab Support uses PagerDuty.

A once-per-quarter meeting between a vendor (us) and their client (customer) to go over key topics. Common discussion points include vendor product and service delivery since the last meeting, progress on goals, problems that need to be addressed, and changes that need to be made. The QBR is often vital to convincing the customer to renew their contract or subscription.

A security testing method that scans source code for vulnerabilities without running the application.

You can read all about SBOMs in our blog post.

A reference to GitLab’s global support organization structure. SGG encompasses support teams across different regions and time zones.

GitLab Support service level agreements might differ from other definitions in other departments.

Support has an internal service level objective on all subsequent responses to tickets after the first response. We use the SLA timer in Zendesk to track this.

An individual with deep knowledge and expertise in a specific area or technology. SMEs are often consulted for complex technical issues requiring specialized knowledge.

See this internal Handbook page, which is the SSoT for SPS.

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are responsible for keeping all user-facing services and other GitLab production systems running smoothly. You can read more here

We use SSAT to capture customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction.

Support engineers who work closely with development teams to provide expertise and feedback.

A senior-level support engineer role within GitLab Support. SSEs typically handle more complex technical issues and may mentor other support engineers.

STAR is used when a support ticket needs extra visibility or prioritization. This is typically communicated in the #support_ticket-attention-requests Slack channel.

A team responsible for maintaining platform safety, preventing abuse, and ensuring compliance with policies and regulations. T&S teams work to protect users and maintain platform integrity.