Upgrade Assistance workflow

Support team Workflow for providing Upgrade Assistance to customers

Overview

As a part of our Priority Support, GitLab Support offers Upgrade Assistance. That is, we’ll review upgrade and rollback plans, providing feedback and suggestions to the customer to help ensure a smooth upgrade. Customers may also request a 30-minute call with a support engineer to answer any final questions and run a final review of their overall plan.

In addition to the upgrade assistance, it is important for GitLab Support to ensure the customer’s plan for the upgrade is accurate and fully supported by GitLab in advance of the production upgrade.

If the customer has not provided a plan, or it lacks the detail we need to support them in their upgrade, feel free to ask for a plan. We have guidance to assist customers in planning their upgrade.

Initiating The Process

  1. The end user initiating the request will open a new Support Request using the Support for Self managed Instance form with the problem type set to “Upgrade Assistance Request” or for eligible users, the US Government Upgrade Planning Assistance Request form in the respective Support Portal. This will generate a high priority ticket in the instance.
  2. The triaging engineer should assign the ticket to themselves.
  3. The ticket assignee should review if the organization has a CSM, if so then the CSM should be added as a CC or follower to the ticket.
  4. The user provided information must include all of the required information.
    • If there is missing, incomplete, or erroneous information the ticket assignee should highlight the deficiencies and provide any insight that may be helpful to correcting them to the user.
    • The ticket assignee may opt to use the Upgrade Request Missing Info macro in Zendesk to request for missing information.
  5. (Optional) When the required information has been collected, the assignee can reach out to any of the folks with an Upgrade or Upgrade Assistance focus on the Skills by Subject page to pair or offer insight asynchronously. Based on the region, consult one of the following trackers to determine who to ask.
  6. If the customer requests to have the optional 30-minute call for a final review, send a personal one time use Calendly link for a 30 minute meeting at least 2-3 days in advance of when the customer plans to upgrade their GitLab instance.
    • If the reviewing engineer needs to hand off the ticket, they must sync up with the engineer who will be performing the final review to ensure proper handoff.
  7. Once the user has scheduled the upgrade, the ticket assignee should put the ticket in an on-hold state until the customer has confirmed that the upgrade has been successfully completed.

Can we recommend that a planned upgrade be postponed?

It is possible for this to occur, especially in situations where the upgrade is poorly planned or likely to cause production downtime. We should encourage the user to reschedule the window so we can allow for more time to test out changes and ensure a smooth upgrade.

Last modified November 27, 2023: Fixes broken .html links with anchors (aaf5adca)
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