Internal Event Tracking
This page provides detailed guidelines on using the Internal Event Tracking system to instrument features on GitLab.
Currently Internal Event Tracking is consolidating the following systems:
- Service Ping
- Snowplow
- AiTracking (GitLab Duo Chat) WIP
Internal Events is an unified interface to track events in GitLab. Each tracking call represents a user action and the associated properties. Internal Events then provides underlying systems the properties they require for their specific analytics needs.
Important: Starting with GitLab 18.0, event data is collected from Self-Managed instances, not just aggregated metrics as in previous versions. This change provides more detailed insights into product usage while maintaining user privacy through pseudonymization.
Analytics systems summary:
| Function\System | Service Ping | Snowplow |
|---|---|---|
| Primary function | Provide aggregated analytics data | Track raw events (user interactions with the service) |
| Data storage | Local instance (Redis, Postgres etc) | Snowflake |
| Data granularity | None (data is aggregated) | Per event |
| Extra parameters | None | Any amount of custom data |
| Receiving delay | Up to 1 week | A few minutes |
| Implementation | Utilises Internal Events, Database records, System Settings | Internal Events plus custom tracking context |
This page is a work in progress. If you have access to the GitLab Slack workspace, use the
#g_monitor_analytics_instrumentation channel for any questions or clarifications.
- Quick start for internal event tracking
- Migrating existing tracking to internal event tracking
- Event definition guide
- Metric definition guide
- Local setup and debugging
- Internal Events CLI contribution guide
- Internal Events Payload Samples
- Standard context fields description
- AI context fields description
- DAP (Duo Agentic Platform) instrumentation guide
- GitLab Duo Classification