Support Definitions


Definitions of Support Impact

The SLA times listed are the time frames in which you can expect the first response.

Severity 4 | Low

Questions or Clarifications around features or documentation or deployments (24 hours) Minimal or no Business Impact. Information, an enhancement, or documentation clarification is requested, but there is no impact on the operation of GitLab. Implementation or production use of GitLab is continuing and work is not impeded. Example: A question about enabling ElasticSearch.

Severity 3 | Normal

Something is preventing normal GitLab operation (8 hours) Some Business Impact. Important GitLab features are unavailable or somewhat slowed, but a workaround is available. GitLab use has a minor loss of operational functionality, regardless of the environment or usage. Example: A known bug impacts the use of GitLab, but a workaround is successfully being used as a temporary solution.

Severity 2 | High

GitLab is Highly Degraded (4 hours) Significant Business Impact. Important GitLab features are unavailable or extremely slowed, with no acceptable workaround. Implementation or production use of GitLab is continuing; however, there is a serious impact on productivity. Example: CI Builds are erroring and not completing successfully, and the software release process is significantly affected.

Severity 1 | Urgent

Your instance of GitLab is unavailable or completely unusable (30 Minutes) A GitLab server or cluster in production is not available, or is otherwise unusable. An emergency ticket can be filed and our On-Call Support Engineer will respond within 30 minutes. Example: GitLab showing 502 errors for all users.

Ticket severity and customer priority

When submitting a ticket to support, you will be asked to select both a severity and a priority. The severity will display definitions aligning with the above section. Priority is lacking any definition - this is because the priority is whatever you and your organization define it as. The customer priority (shorted on the forms as priority) is Support's way of asking the impact or importance the ticket has to your organization and its needs (business, technical, etc.).

Note: The US Government support portal is often setup differently than the Global support portal and might differ in the questions asked via the ticket submission forms.

Definition of Scaled Architecture

Scaled architecture is defined as any GitLab installation that separates services for the purposes of resilience, redundancy or scale. As a guide, our 2,000 User Reference Architecture (and higher) would fall under this category.
Priority Support is required to receive assistance in troubleshooting a scaled implementation of GitLab.
In Omnibus and Source installations, Scaled Architecture is any deployment with multiple GitLab application nodes. This does not include external services such as Amazon RDS or ElastiCache.

Service Scaled Architecture Not Scaled Architecture
Application (GitLab Rails) Using multiple application nodes to provide resilience, scalability or availability Using a single application node
Database Using multiple database servers with Consul and PgBouncer Using a single separate database or managed database service
Caching Using Redis HA across multiple servers with Sentinel Using a single separate server for Redis or a managed Redis service
Repository / Object Storage Using one or more separate Gitaly nodes. Using NFS across multiple application servers. Storing objects in S3
Job Processing Using one or more separate Sidekiq nodes Using Sidekiq on the same host as a single application node
Load Balancing Using a Load Balancer to balance connections between multiple application nodes Using a single application node
Monitoring Not considered in the definition of Scaled Architecture Not considered in the definition of Scaled Architecture

Support Email Domains

As a convenience, GitLab's Support Portal allows users to collaborate on raised tickets via email. If your company uses allowlists for managing incoming email, you may receive email from GitLab Support from the following domains:

  • support.gitlab.com
  • gitlab.zendesk.com
  • gitlab.com