Skip to content

[Feature flag] Rollout of `seat_count_alerts`

Summary

This issue is to rollout the seat count alerts for group owners feature on production, that is currently behind the seat_count_alerts feature flag.

SaaS customers are being surprised and taken off-guard by Quarterly Subscription reconciliations. Because self-service SaaS customers have not historically been charged true-ups, the QSR process and the fact that they have to pay for overages is totally new.

This feature displays an alert to group owners on QSR enabled subscriptions at different thresholds to warn them when their group is approaching the number of purchased seats in their subscription.

Owners

  • Team: Fulfillment Purchase
  • Most appropriate slack channel to reach out to: #g_purchase
  • Best individual to reach out to: @jhyson
  • PM: @tgolubeva

Expectations

What are we expecting to happen?

The usage alert will be displayed to group owners when they are approaching their purchased seat count. This will show up on the project, group and subgroup, billing and usage pages.

When is the feature viable?

When the MRs associated with [SaaS] Alert to group Owners when group is appr... (#348481 - closed) are merged, in particular Add seat count usage alerts to group pages (!89204 - merged), which ties up all the work for this issue.

What might happen if this goes wrong?

High traffic pages could potentially break or suffer performance issues.

What can we monitor to detect problems with this?

Consider mentioning checks for 5xx errors or other anomalies like an increase in redirects (302 HTTP response status)

Sentry:

What can we check for monitoring production after rollouts?

Consider adding links to check for Sentry errors, Production logs for 5xx, 302s, etc.

Sentry:

Kibana

Visualisation of the duration of requests for controllers affects by this change

Error responses on controllers affected by this change

CustomersDot:

Rollout Steps

Rollout on non-production environments

  • Ensure that the feature MRs have been deployed to non-production environments.
    • /chatops run auto_deploy status d284afe981c503c854cbe8c8283e916ea04b8769
  • Enable the feature globally on non-production environments.
    • /chatops run feature set seat_count_alerts true --dev
    • /chatops run feature set seat_count_alerts true --staging
  • Verify that the feature works as expected. Posting the QA result in this issue is preferable. The best environment to validate the feature in is staging-canary as this is the first environment deployed to. Note you will need to make sure you are configured to use canary as outlined here when accessing the staging environment in order to make sure you are testing appropriately.

Specific rollout on production

  • Ensure that the feature MRs have been deployed to both production and canary.
    • /chatops run auto_deploy status d284afe981c503c854cbe8c8283e916ea04b8769
  • If you're using group-actor, you must enable the feature on these entries:
    • /chatops run feature set --group=gitlab-org,gitlab-com seat_count_alerts true
  • Verify that the feature works on the specific entries. Posting the QA result in this issue is preferable.

Preparation before global rollout

  • Check if the feature flag change needs to be accompanied with a change management issue. Cross link the issue here if it does.
  • Ensure that you or a representative in development can be available for at least 2 hours after feature flag updates in production. If a different developer will be covering, or an exception is needed, please inform the oncall SRE by using the @sre-oncall Slack alias.
  • Ensure that documentation has been updated (More info).
  • Announce on the feature issue an estimated time this will be enabled on GitLab.com.
  • Ensure that any breaking changes have been announced following the release post process to ensure GitLab customers are aware.
  • Notify #support_gitlab-com and your team channel (more guidance when this is necessary in the dev docs).

Global rollout on production

For visibility, all /chatops commands that target production should be executed in the #production slack channel and cross-posted (with the command results) to the responsible team's slack channel (#g_purchase).

  • Incrementally roll out the feature.
    • If the feature flag in code has an actor, perform actor-based rollout.
      • /chatops run feature set seat_count_alerts 25 --actors
      • /chatops run feature set seat_count_alerts 50 --actors
      • /chatops run feature set seat_count_alerts 75 --actors
      • /chatops run feature set seat_count_alerts 100 --actors
    • Enable the feature globally on production environment.
      • /chatops run feature set seat_count_alerts true
  • Announce on the feature issue that the feature has been globally enabled.
  • Wait for at least one day for the verification term.

Release the feature

After the feature has been deemed stable, the clean up should be done as soon as possible to permanently enable the feature and reduce complexity in the codebase.

You can either create a follow-up issue for Feature Flag Cleanup or use the checklist below in this same issue.

  • Create a merge request to remove seat_count_alerts feature flag. Ask for review and merge it.
    • Remove all references to the feature flag from the codebase.
    • Remove the YAML definitions for the feature from the repository.
    • Create a changelog entry.
  • Ensure that the cleanup MR has been included in the release package. If the merge request was deployed before the monthly release was tagged, the feature can be officially announced in a release blog post.
    • /chatops run release check <merge-request-url> <milestone>
  • Close the feature issue to indicate the feature will be released in the current milestone.
  • If not already done, clean up the feature flag from all environments by running these chatops command in #production channel:
    • /chatops run feature delete seat_count_alerts --dev --staging --staging-ref --production
  • Close this rollout issue.

Rollback Steps

  • This feature can be disabled by running the following Chatops command:
/chatops run feature set seat_count_alerts false
Edited by Josianne Hyson