ChatOps in GitLab will be available to everyone

ChatOps with all its functionality will be free - this is our gift for you on holidays.

GitLab is an open-core project that has both paid and free products. In what category this or that product will go, defines our assumption about the main user . What contributors need for personal use, we make free .

Sometimes we misjudge the audience. In case of an error, we do not make open tools paid, but we open paid ones.

The last case is ChatOps in GitLab . ChatOps allows you to run commands directly from the chat (currently supported by Slack and Mattermost). When there is a common channel, it allows you to work together in real time. We use this function in production when we publish and deploy GitLab and access the database:

We found that this feature is popular among contributors for personal use, so in GitLab 11.8 we translate it into the category of free. Want to get it before - just confirm the merge-request for version 11.7.

The ChatOps market did not start as many of us had predicted (including me). The first client of ChatOps was Hubot, but since 2015 its popularity has declined . When the new generation of ChatOps in the Cog project came out , I took heart, but the company behind this initiative curtailed its activities .

I spoke with experts in this industry, and I thought that ChatOps needed 5 components to succeed:

• Monitoring ChatOps is great for collaborative troubleshooting, so it should easily display graphs.
• Query support. Allow parameters, such as the SQL command, to run or show a graph of a specific server.
• Tolerance Everyone should have a different level of tolerance, preferably based on roles, RBAC .
• Zero configuration. You must have access to many features without having to install them.
• Compatibility. ChatOps should work the same for all employees in an organization.

It seems to me that monitoring and query support was introduced for Hubot. In it, anyone who had an admission could do anything, but in the Cog they added access levels, correcting this. GitLab introduced zero configuration and compatibility, so everything now works out of the box. In GitLab, things work out of the box because they are a single application for the entire DevOps life cycle. We know how to build an app with Auto DevOps . GitLab has monitoring with metrics and tracing.

There are currently no deployment teams and default metrics in ChatOps. Hopefully, now that ChatOps becomes free, it will encourage more people to use it and contribute to its development.

Over this year, our wider community has been working harder: more than 150 improvements have been made to various parts of the latest version of GitLab.

For this we are extremely grateful to you. Happy Holidays!

Our gift: We're making GitLab ChatOps available to everyone via @sytses Click to tweet!