What needs improvement with GitLab?

Regarding improvements, making task management is something that GitLab can potentially make easier, similar to what DevOps or Jira does.

One significant feature we lack is the configuration that enforces code reviews, which simplifies the development life cycle. Unfortunately, this is available only at a higher license level than we currently use. Additionally, improvements are needed for stability, as the system tends to degrade over a few days and often requires a restart.

GitLab should embed security features when dealing with source code. It is essential to conduct proper testing, such as unit tests and code coverage, within the SDLC pipelines. Incorporating tools like JMeter ( /products/apache-jmeter-reviews ) or load testing into the pipelines would be beneficial.

Certain features in Jira are not available in GitLab, such as the functionality to have weights at the milestone and epic levels. Hopefully, these features will be resolved with work items in GitLab. Also, if the child items are open in GitLab, closing the parent should not be allowed. While GitLab is a great tool for developers, it lacks project planner features. Roadmaps and Gantt charts in GitLab are not as advanced as in Jira, and changing start and end dates is more laborious in GitLab. Bridging the gap for project planners would make GitLab a more complete tool.

There are missing search features, particularly when searching repositories or applying filters. Additionally, I have encountered issues with the deployment of CI/CD pipelines, especially dealing with variable environments. Creating a YAML file with numerous variables can be challenging without a way to separate them by different environments. It would be beneficial to have a user-friendly interface for setting up these configurations, instead of just writing YAML files.

There are some challenges with repository file management as GitLab may struggle to manage larger files. Improvements could be made regarding size management and file partitioning. Also, the UI has remained the same for a couple of years and could benefit from an update with AI features and better customization.

GitLab can improve its user interface to make conflict resolution more user-friendly. Better and more descriptive logs during CI/CD pipeline configuration would also be beneficial to diagnose issues more quickly. Sometimes, the logs provided are not sufficient to understand the errors, and we needed assistance from our DevOps team.

The pricing has been substantially increased, which is a major concern. While GitLab has a lot of documentation, the complexity and volume can be overwhelming, especially for new learners. Structuring the documentation more effectively could help alleviate this issue.

In the next release, I would like to see GitLab expand its integration capabilities to include platforms like DigitalOcean, which developers widely use for cloud infrastructure. Enhancing CI/CD automation features specifically tailored for DigitalOcean would be beneficial.

GitLab could consider introducing a code-scanning tool. Purchasing such tools from external markets can incur charges, which might not be favorable. Integrating these features into GitLab would streamline the pipeline and make it more convenient for users.

I believe there's room for improvement in the advanced features, particularly in enhancing the pipeline functionalities. Better integration and usability within the pipeline could make a significant difference in user experience. I would suggest considering new features or functions that could streamline workflows further and make using GitLab even more efficient. Having additional functionalities that cater to specific needs could greatly enhance the overall experience with the platform.

The tool should include a feature that helps to edit the code directly.

The documentation is confusing. Sometimes, it is incomplete or has incorrect information. I have informed the vendor about it. Some features in the GitLab Community Edition are not available to us.

Some of the programmers in my company have had complaints about the product. We do face issues in our company when we run out of disk space. We had to do some low-level system interventions to recover the server from GitLab in our company. It would be good if GitLab implemented some diagnostic features so that the server prevents functioning when it detects insufficient disk space. It is important to prevent cache to avoid running out of disk space. Considering the aforementioned details, making a recovery wasn’t simple.

In terms of the solution's interface and features, I am satisfied. As a partner, sometimes it's difficult to get support. They have a really complicated procedure for their support. Apart from the aforementioned reason, I am very satisfied with the product. It is only after we are registered that we get proper support from GitLab. The registration itself it's quite complicated, and it is mainly because they want to make sure that the users with a license contact the right support team.

Merge conflicts and repository maintenance could improve. If there is someone new to the system they would not know if there is a conflict. In a feature release, it would be helpful if there was AI integrated into the system. For example, if there was a CI/CD pipeline available, we could configure them for our purpose without doing the process manually.

The release schedules are quite clear. Even if I'm expecting some improvement, the improvement release cycles are already there in place. So even if I say I want some improvement, they will say it is already planned in the first quarter, second quarter, or third quarter. That said, most everything is quite improved already, and they're improving even further still.

GitLab could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff.

I'm new to GitLab, so I would appreciate more documentation about the code and commands.

We'd always like to see better pricing on the product. If they could make the cost lower, that would be ideal for users.

For as long as I have used GitLab, I haven't encountered any major limitations. However, I think that perhaps the search functionality could be better. The main shortcoming is that with some parts of GitLab, things can get quite complex. Especially in the beginning, the learning curve can be a bit steep and it takes some time to learn how to use the tools. That said, once you understand the mentality of it, it becomes easy.

The solution should expand features to match other tools such as Coverity, Veracode, or SonarQube with its static code analysis tool so third-party integrations are not required. There can be a lapse of fifteen minutes to a day when updates are pushed. We do receive email notification of upcoming lapses and push progress, so that helps.

I've noticed an area for improvement in GitLab, particularly needing to go through many steps to push the code to the repository. Resolving that issue would make the product better. My team quickly fixed it by writing a small script, then double-clicking or enabling the script to take care of the issue. However, that quick fix was from my team and not the GitLab team, so in the next release, if an automatic deployment feature would be available in GitLab, then that would be good because, in Visual Studio, you can do that with just one click of a button.

They have had a Kubernetes integration built in, but they recently announced that in Version 16 they're going to strip out the legacy Kubernetes integration, and then introduce a new way of doing the integration. I don't really like the new way because it is pretty focused on the on-premise environment, but we're in a hybrid environment. The integration they're offering is not really a good fit for hybrid infrastructure and I was disappointed with that new feature. I work for a government-based institution in the US and government-based institutions are very strict about compliance and security. The new model GitLab is offering implies the connectivity will be initiated from the server side to the clients, meaning from Kubernetes back to GitLab, and that's not going to work in our space. We cannot allow traffic back from the cloud to on-prem, so that's going to be a compliance violation. I understand why they want to implement the feature, maybe it's going to be more solid, but it looks like they aren't taking into consideration hybrid environments and the security and compliance aspects. We will find a workaround, but we're still kind of disappointed. It'll generate a lot of additional work. One feature that has been requested by our development team is a multi-level review of the pool request. When you maintain code and you've got a lot of contributors, a contributor can submit a change in the form of a pool request. There is a feature called merge request in GitLab for when you have a team of people who are supposed to approve a change, but Atlassian BitBucket has a more complete version of the same feature, which includes a multi-approval mechanism. For instance, if you have three people, you can create a rule for how changes should be approved. Maybe they should be approved by you and me and the third guy is not really important, or it could be approved by only you or me, or all three of us together. BitBucket has that flexibility and there is no such flexibility in GitLab.

We had to write GitLab configuration files, commands and conditions, in a YML format. I would like configuration of a YML file to be done via UI rather than a code file. There should be support for code files, as well, but if there could be a UI for it and a little bit of documentation along with it, that would help.

When deploying the solution on cloud and the CI/CD pipeline, we have to define the steps and it becomes confusing. The trend is shifting toward CI/CD pipeline automation, so GitLab could provide some features that help with CI/CD automation. There could also be integration with different cloud services like GCP, AWS, or Microsoft Azure. A one-click deployment with the CI/CD pipeline of our code would be a good feature.

GitLab can improve by integrating with more tools, such as servers with Docker.

The integration could be slightly better. The interface should be more user-friendly.

Authentication can be a problem when you have an application and you want to configure it with them. I used Spring Cloud config and to connect that to GitLab was so hard. It took hours for me to configure that.

The documentation in GitLab could be improved a bit. For example, their RBAC is role-based access, which is fine but not very good. It could also be improved a lot.

The deployment and performance of GitLab could be better. In addition, the solution could be faster.

It is a little complex to set up the pipelines within the solution.

I'm not sure of the complete capabilities of the tool as I don't use it that much. Perhaps the integration could be better.

The solution should be more cloud-native and have more cloud-native capabilities and features. It should be more GitOps-ready.

We'd like to see better integration with the Atlassian ecosystem. There needs to be better and native integration. That is really useful for us as Atlassian Jira has strong integration with Bitbucket, and Bitbucket is a computation of GitLab.

Its security features are very expensive. The Ultimate version is very expensive. I would like more Agile features in the Premium version. The Premium version should have all Agile features that exist in the Ultimate version. IBM AOM has a complete Agile implementation, but in GitLab, you only have these features if you buy the Ultimate version. It would be good if we can use these in the Premium version.

While I don't have any specific complaints about GitLab, there are always things that could be better. Better support, for example, could be provided. The technology could be made simpler to use, it should not be overly complex. It should be used by a larger number of people. They should raise awareness.

We would like to generate document pages from the sources. Right now, we can't do that. The testing could be better in that, for the code quality, now we use an external product and maybe the internal product could be more efficient.

The solution could improve by having better integration.

It would be better if there weren't any outages. There are occasions where we usually see a lot of outages using GitLab. It happens at least once a week or something like that. Whatever pipelines you're running, to check the logs, you need to have a different set of tools like Argus or something like that. If you have pipelines running on GitLab, you need a separate service deployed to view the logs, which is kind of a pain. If the logs can be used conveniently on GitLab, that would be definitely helpful. I'm not talking about the CI/CD pipelines but the back-end services and microservices deployed over GitLab. To view the logs for those microservices, you need to have separate log viewers, which is kind of a pain.

It could have more security integrations and the ability to check the vulnerability of the code. I don't think it is a responsibility of Gitlab, but it would be nice to have more options to integrate with.

The solution could improve by providing more integration into the CI/CD pipeline, an autocomplete search tool, and more supporting documentation.

In the free version, when a merge request is raised, there is no way to enforce certain rules. We can't enforce that this merge request must be reviewed or approved by two or three people in the team before it is pushed to the master branch. That's why we are exploring using some agents.

It can be free for commercial use of project management and code integrity features.

It would be really good if they integrated more features in application security. I would also like to see scanning for some vulnerabilities and allow people to have a one-stop glance at the state of the security application

We are having a few problems integrating with Jira at the moment, which is something that our IT department is investigating. In general, integrating with third-party tools is easy for some but difficult for others. When I create a new project, I go through all of the settings, and then I can integrate that with other tools. However, with Jira, I have problems. If we could have GitLab execute some of the system tests then it would be good because as it is now, we have to rely on another tool. Ideally, it would execute a system test, a unit test, and then create a report. It is possible to do it but requires a lot of scripting expertise. It should be easily available on their menu, similar to adding tests, configuring the tests you want to execute when you launch a build, so the build would be done then tests would be performed, and the report would be created. This would allow us to know what went wrong during our systems test. If this aspect was more integrated into their interface, instead of relying on developers to script everything, it would be easier. I would like to see better integration with third-party software.

The documentation could be improved to help newcomers better understand things like creating new branches.

I would like to see better integration with project management tools such as Jira. I know that integration does exist for some, but it can be better. In the future, I would like to be able to add what I want.

The reporting could be improved and I'd like to see some testing or other deployment tools and integration with third parties.

I've looked at GitLab's roadmap. The only thing our company is really waiting on in terms of features is the development of metrics. We're looking forward to being able to take advantage of them.

We do reviews as I also work with some of the leadership teams. Leadership teams generally focus on statistics, metrics, or some sort of dashboard. They would like to have the ability to categorize these things. They would like to have a very high-level view. That would help. Someone who is not really a developer, but a leadership team. They are always interested in statistics or metrics features. That is something I would see imbedded into GitLab. That would help someone who is from the outside take a view and understand how qualitative the code is, because they cannot definitely dive in and look at the code, and they will not be able to understand all the details. At a high level, if they want to see and understand, at least they will have some confidence about how the projects are going on.

GitLab doesn't have AWS integration. It would be better to have integration with other container management environments beyond Kubernetes. It has very good integration with Kubernetes, but it doesn't have good integration with, for example, AWS, ETS, etc.