Cross-Region Coordination and Collaboration

**************** This page is effective as of 2024-Aug-01 ****************

Overview

Although each region within GitLab Support has its own specific responsibilities each day, and has the freedom to manage those responsibilities in whatever ways work best for them, the regions must also provide a consistent experience to customers. To do that, the regions must coordinate and collaborate with each other.

The purpose of this page is to present clearly the workflows used by the regions in working together and all the information about regional structures that support those workflows.

Regional queue-related responsibilities

Regional queue hours

During regional queue hours, Support Engineers are expected to be actively monitoring and taking new tickets from the queue. These are hours when the region is responsible for the queue. When two regions’ hours overlap, they share that responsibility.

Clean queue

Each region is responsible for leaving a clean queue for the next region by the end of their regional queue hours. A clean queue for Region X has no unassigned tickets in it with a preferred region of Region X. Note that if a region has a cleanup hour at the end of its day, that hour will come after their regional queue hours end.

Cleanup hour

A cleanup hour is a time during which the region is not responsible for taking tickets from the queue, and is instead responsible for making sure that their end-of-day activities, such as initiating rehomes, are done.

The purpose of the cleanup hour is to make it reasonable for an SE to take a new ticket from the queue before cleanup hour by having the knowledge that their normal workday includes an hour after their FRT responsibilities end. They would be able to take a new ticket even at the very last minute of regional queue hours, and still have time to construct and send a good first response during the “free” hour that is “cleanup time.”

Cleanup hour will occur for different people in a region at different times during the day, based on each individual’s working hours. We only represent cleanup hour in the table at the end of a region’s day, with the understanding that for all other hours, the ✅ represents both “regional queue hours” (FRT time) and “individual cleanup hour”.

Extra capacity hour

An extra capacity hour is a time during which some Support Engineers in a region might be working on tickets even though the region is not officially responsible for taking new tickets from the queue. We display these hours to help people to know when they might be able to find people working outside of regional queue hours in other regions.

Queue-related responsibilities schedule

This table defines the queue-related responsibilities of Support Engineers in each region for each hour of the day. The hours are given in UTC. Each hour for each region is marked with exactly one of the symbols defined here.

Legend

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