• Network configuration
• Version Check
  • Request flow example
• Usage Ping
  • Request flow example
  • Deactivate the usage ping
• Instance statistics visibility
• Usage Statistics Collected

Usage statistics

GitLab Inc. will periodically collect information about your instance in order to perform various actions.

All statistics are opt-out. You can enable/disable them in the Admin Area > Settings > Metrics and profiling section Usage statistics.

Network configuration

Allow network traffic from your GitLab instance to IP address 104.196.17.203:443, to send usage statistics to GitLab Inc.

If your GitLab instance is behind a proxy, set the appropriate proxy configuration variables.

Version Check

If enabled, version check will inform you if a new version is available and the importance of it through a status. This is shown on the help page (i.e. /help) for all signed in users, and on the admin pages. The statuses are:

• Green: You are running the latest version of GitLab.
• Orange: An updated version of GitLab is available.
• Red: The version of GitLab you are running is vulnerable. You should install the latest version with security fixes as soon as possible.

GitLab Inc. collects your instance’s version and hostname (through the HTTP referer) as part of the version check. No other information is collected.

This information is used, among other things, to identify to which versions patches will need to be backported, making sure active GitLab instances remain secure.

If you disable version check, this information will not be collected. Enable or disable the version check in Admin Area > Settings > Metrics and profiling > Usage statistics.

Request flow example

The following example shows a basic request/response flow between the self-managed GitLab instance and the GitLab Version Application:

Usage Ping

GitLab sends a weekly payload containing usage data to GitLab Inc. The usage ping uses high-level data to help our product, support, and sales teams. It does not send any project names, usernames, or any other specific data. The information from the usage ping is not anonymous, it is linked to the hostname of the instance.

You can view the exact JSON payload in the administration panel. To view the payload:

1. Navigate to the Admin Area > Settings > Metrics and profiling.
2. Expand the Usage statistics section.
3. Click the Preview payload button.

You can see how the usage ping data maps to different stages of the product.

Usage ping is important to GitLab as we use it to calculate our Action Monthly Active Users (AMAU) which helps us measure the success of our features.

Request flow example

The following example shows a basic request/response flow between the self-managed GitLab instance, GitLab Version Application, GitLab License Application and Salesforce:

Deactivate the usage ping

The usage ping is opt-out. If you want to deactivate this feature, go to the Settings page of your administration panel and uncheck the Usage ping checkbox.

To disable the usage ping and prevent it from being configured in future through the administration panel, Omnibus installs can set the following in gitlab.rb:

gitlab_rails['usage_ping_enabled'] = false

And source installs can set the following in gitlab.yml:

production: &base
  # ...
  gitlab:
    # ...
    usage_ping_enabled: false

Instance statistics visibility

Once usage ping is enabled, GitLab will gather data from other instances and will be able to show usage statistics of your instance to your users.

To make this visible only to admins, go to Admin Area > Settings > Metrics and profiling, expand Usage statistics, and set the Instance Statistics visibility option to Only admins.

Usage Statistics Collected