The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
This page outlines the Direction for the GitLab Switchboard category which belongs to the GitLab Dedicated group. To provide feedback or ask questions about this product category, reach out to the Product Manager.
You can contribute to this category by:
To learn more about concepts and terminology discussed in this direction page, please refer to the Switchboard Glossary.
Switchboard is the customer console for the GitLab Dedicated single-tenant SaaS offering. Switchboard is used both by GitLab Dedicated customers and internal GitLab teams who support and maintain GitLab Dedicated instances.
Switchboard also automates much of the ongoing maintenance work needed to maintain GitLab Dedicated instances, reducing the amount of time internal teams need to spend on operational tasks and freeing up bandwidth to focus on maturing and adding features to GitLab Dedicated.
Our north star for Switchboard is to reduce time to value (TTV) for new GitLab Dedicated customers and create internal efficiencies by minimizing the assistance tenant operators need from GitLab to manage their instances.
Maturing Switchboard is critical to the success of GitLab Dedicated at scale.
During the Beta and Limited Availability (LA) phases of GitLab Dedicated, all management of tenant instances was performed by the same internal SRE teams who are responsible for developing the architecture and automation needed to fully scale GitLab Dedicated as a product offering.
While regular tenant maintenance operations continue to be handled by these teams, customer tenant admins can use Switchboard to quickly make configuration changes to their organization's GitLab Dedicated tenant instance on their own. Switchboard also serves as the "front door" to GitLab Dedicated by providing a welcoming and efficient onboarding experience.
From an operational and architectural perspective, Switchboard serves as the primary connection between internal tenant operators and GitLab Dedicated tenant instances, enabling them to operate at scale. GitLab tenant operators do not have direct access to customer tenant environments. For more information, see Access controls and the GitLab Dedicated architecture.
Switchboard shares its target customer with GitLab Dedicated.
The primary user persona for Switchboard is Sidney (systems administrator), with some overlap with Priyanka (platform engineer).
Within GitLab, Switchboard is used by the tenant operators (SREs), support, and professional services teams.
Similar portals or consoles have been built for other products used by Switchboard's target audience including Managed Elasticsearch, MongoDB cloud, AWS and IBM power. See Figma page for more details (internal only).
We will look to common patterns shared by these portals as we continue to build out the capabilities of Switchboard.
We have begun using the Performance Indicator framework to measure Switchboard's contributions to engineering efficiency.
GitLab team members can review the Saas Platforms PI page for the latest updates.
Read more about how we arrived at our metric through the SaaS Platforms North Star workshop in FY24.
Switchboard has been generally available since 2023-09-29.
Most of the internal operators' responsibilities (maintenance windows, incident response/remediation) are now completed with the Switchboard application. Monitoring tools remain separate and are housed within the tenant instances themselves. Many formerly manual tasks have been automated or removed.
Over the past year, we have matured Switchboard as an application by adding several foundational "table stakes" capabilities including email notifications and a configuration change log visible to Dedicated customers.
See our documentation for the most up to date list of customer-facing configurations and features available in Switchboard.
Moving forward, the Switchboard team's focus will continue to remain balanced between delivering new customer-facing features and internal-facing work to continue to streamline internal operations.
New customer-facing work will be either tied to supporting significant new GitLab Dedicated features (e.g. Hosted Runners for Dedicated) or to further enable self-serve capabilities for GitLab Dedicated tenant admins.
Internal-facing Switchboard work will focus not only on continuing to automate operational tasks and reduce engineering toil within the Dedicated group but also on investigating where foundational Switchboard components might be relevant to other teams and initiatives within SaaS Platforms.
In FY25 Q4 we will further expand Switchboard's foundational capabilities by completing foundational work to allow Dedicated customers to integrate Switchboard with their own IDPs and enable SSO.
These two capabilties are examples of requests we have received from enterprises with complex access and compliance requirements which is expected given GitLab Dedicated's target customer base. As Switchboard continues to mature, we expect we will add more compliance-focused features like these.
We will also begin building out an instance of Switchboard to meet the needs of GitLab Dedicated for Government based on the investigation underway in FY25 Q3.
In FY25 Q3 our two primary focuses for customers are the tenant overview page and enabling self-serve configuration of Outbound Private Link and Private Hosted Zones.
For internal-only features we are focused on making improvements to emergency maintenance automation, reducing toil required for Hosted Runner onboarding to support GA, and implementing a review app to minimize Quality concerns.
For more details see our Q3 OKRs:
Switchboard will not directly interact with customer tenant environments. Read more about that in the GitLab Dedicated documentation.
Switchboard will not replace or reproduce functionality of logging or monitoring tools for Dedicated instances (e.g. Grafana dashboards for infrastructure health).
In the first half of FY25, the Switchboard team has been equally focused on closing critical gaps in customer-facing functionality and further automating internal operations work to increase efficiency of the Environment Automation team.
NOTE: Internal demo videos of all features completed by the Switchboard team in FY25 are available in our demo library as well as on each completed epic linked below.
Below are the key capabilities we plan to add to Switchboard in the second half of FY25 and first half of FY26.
The Switchboard roadmap remains closely tied to the GitLab Dedicated roadmap - we often have dependencies on the Environment Automation team or vice versa when developing new features or feature enhancements.
It is common for new Switchboard features to be driven by the growing set of features available for GitLab Dedicated
We are also continuing to gather internal feedback and feature requests via this feedback issue (internal).