Development metrics collection Service

• Alerts: https://alerts.gitlab.net/#/alerts?filter=%7Btype%3D%22observer%22%2C%20tier%3D%22inf%22%7D
• Label: gitlab-com/gl-infra/production~“Service::observer”

Quick Links

Reference	Link
Source	gitlab-org/quality/observer
Production endpoint	https://dx-observer.runway.gitlab.net
Environments	Project environments
Releases	Tag releases
Dashboard	Grafana
Production logs (jobs)	Cloud Logging
Production logs (API)	Cloud Logging
Owner	Developer Experience

Summary

Observer is a GitLab DX data collection service. It is the ingest path for the dashboards in dashboards/dx/, which are ClickHouse-backed.

Architecture

Observer is a Ruby on Rails application deployed on Runway (Google Cloud Run, in the gitlab-runway-production GCP project).

Service Management

Observer is fully managed from a single GitLab project: gitlab-org/quality/observer.

Deployment is handled by Runway:

• Staging deploys automatically from every push to main and runs in dry-run mode (no writes to production ClickHouse), allowing safe pre-production validation.
• Production deploys only on tag push pipelines. Tags are created by manually triggering the version-bump pipeline from the GitLab UI, which produces a new Release with a changelog.

Application secrets (including the webhook authentication token and ClickHouse credentials) are stored in Rails encrypted credentials (config/credentials.yml.enc). The decryption key is stored in the Runway app vault entry. See the project README for rotation instructions.

Monitoring/Alerting

• Service dashboard: Grafana
• Downstream dashboards consuming Observer data: dashboards/dx/
• Logs: see Quick Links above (staging logs use the same queries against the gitlab-runway-staging project).

Links to further Documentation

• Observer project README — local development, webhook setup, credentials, mise tasks.
• Runway documentation — deployment platform.
• ClickHouse Cloud runbook — downstream storage.