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.

Orange version check example

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:

sequenceDiagram participant GitLab instance participant Version Application GitLab instance->>Version Application: Is there a version update? loop Version Check Version Application->>Version Application: Record version info end Version Application->>GitLab instance: Response (PNG/SVG)

Usage Ping

See Usage Ping guide.

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.