GitLab Premium

I use ClickHouse  and get logs from ClickHouse . I use Loki sometimes. Prometheus is always a thing with Grafana  that I use hand-to-hand. Mostly it's Loki and ClickHouse.

I had tried to use TimescaleDB once, but it wasn't an easier option to integrate and set things up, so I just lifted it off and I'm using Loki and ClickHouse for now.

My company doesn't allow me to use any cloud-based services as of now, so everything has to be on-premises and self-hosted. For that reason, I don't use any additional third-party services. But in the near future, when I have the flexibility and liberty of doing it in my organization, I would definitely choose to go for third-party options.

I use GitLab . I use GitLab  on our own independent storage servers over here and everything is in-house as I said. We use GitLab and version control all of our codebases and model artifacts and other assets locally in our own storage servers.

The main reason we use GitLab is because we are not supposed to store our code on any other external cloud services. We need to have our own in-house storage solution and in-house version controlling system. Any architecture that we design, we need to have it in-house and air-gapped from the rest of the world. Everything has to be in our control. The bare-metal vertical integration of having servers in our own premises is the reason why I use GitLab.

I appreciate the UI. It's very simple as well as intuitive at the same time. The biggest functionality that I appreciate is that GitLab gives you the liberty to self-host things on your own and keeps things on-premises, as well as being very API-friendly, similar to the original GitHub . There is no cumbersome learning curve to adapt GitLab separately from GitHub . It's a seamless transition switching from the standard GitHub to GitLab.

It's a good UI to work with. GitLab is a consolidation of all of the services. I can use my Docker  container builds and my images and store them locally. I can pull those builds and use Docker  as well as integrate Docker in the version control pipeline. It becomes very seamless. Sometimes my containers go down or I need to spin up a new node of a computer on its own in my local infrastructure. The system already has a cron job which goes and fetches the appropriate Docker, the latest Docker build with the correct Docker image and it pulls it off.

I would appreciate some more tutorials being put out in the mainstream media like on YouTube, where I could go and learn more about GitLab. Reading a deep dive into the documentation and meddling things on my own, then going and educating my whole team on that is a cumbersome task. I would appreciate if nice, customized YouTube tutorials would be available on YouTube by the official GitLab or maybe by some third-party YouTubers that you guys could partner with, similar to what PyTorch  or Weights & Biases have done to democratize the use of their software tools. That would be great on my end.

I have been using GitLab Premium  for exactly two years.

I would give a rating of eleven in that case, because we never had a downtime with GitLab Premium . It has never let us down.

I couldn't have an opinion on that because, as I said, we do things in-house. Scalability and the type of auto-scaling or scale-up that we need to do is on my system administrators.

I absolutely am still working with Grafana . For the most part, only partially for some small, tiny projects, I have moved to SigNoz . But for my main, primarily mega, mega foundational projects, the spectacular, the hero projects of my organization, I always prefer Grafana.

It is complex. It takes a good amount of time. Had I had to do it again, I would definitely use an AI agent to do it, because back then two years ago, when I was setting up GitLab Premium on my own in my enterprise, I had to take a good amount of four days to set things up and to seamlessly test everything so that things are working perfectly across my teams.

As of now, I haven't used that. My organization is pretty slim. Our technical team picks up things on their own and does things on their own independently. It's a one-man army kind of developer space in our organization. For that reason, we don't have any cross-communication with developers. Whatever happens, happens verbally, and for that reason, we don't use Jira  or any other ticketing solutions.

It's not my responsibility. I have a system admin who looks into the security part of it, but we haven't meddled with any specific functionalities in the security side of it. Whatever we get standard in-house with the default configurations, we just use it.

There are several alternate solutions available.

We don't work in code review. Our developers write their own test cases. Once the test cases pass, the code goes into the specific another department. A solutions architect or a tech lead would be a suitable role for implementation of GitLab Premium. I give this product a rating of ten out of ten.