Hosted runners for GitLab Dedicated

Hosted runners

Hosted Runners for GitLab Dedicated is a product first offered to GitLab Dedicated customers for beta testing in Q4 FY25, with a general availability target of Q2 FY26.

Who is using Hosted Runners?

To identify if a customer is using Hosted Runners, use Switchboard.

1. Log in to Switchboard – all Support Engineers can access Switchboard
2. Click Manage next to the tenant that you’re interested in
3. Look for Hosted runners at the top (If you do not see Hosted runners, that tenant isn’t using Hosted runners for GitLab Dedicated)

Viewing Logs

gitlab-runner and systemd logs are available in OpenSearch alongside the GitLab Dedicated application logs.

To view on Runner-related logs only:

1. Filter generally with fluentd_tag:cloudwatch.*
2. Obtain the more exact fluentd_tag:cloudwatch.<name>-fleeting-logs, from the _source column of initial results, and apply it. The <name> is a customer-specific value (attribute of CommonProperties on Runner Model), but is not yet available in Switchboard.
3. Using that same prefix based on cloudwatch.<name> manager-logs are available as well.

For job logs reach out to the customer.

Monitoring

Monitoring Hosted Runners is done in Grafana. Details on how to access Grafana are available in GitLab Dedicated Observability and Monitoring (Grafana).

Once in Grafana, go to Dashboards and search the Hosted Runner(s) Overview dashboard. This dashboard has plots on different runner metrics. The dashboard is available for all tenants but is only populated if Hosted Runners are being used by the customer.

Architecture

GitLab Hosted Runners are created on ec2 AWS instances.

Useful References

• Dedicated team Hosted Runner Model
• Dedicated team Hosted Runner technical document