GitLab offers a variety of support options for all customers and users on both paid and free tiers. You should be able to find help using the resources linked below, regardless of how you use GitLab. There are many ways to contact Support, but the first step for most people should be to search our documentation.
If you can't find an answer to your question, or you are affected by an outage, then customers who are in a paid tier should start by consulting our statement of support while being mindful of what is outside of the scope of support. Please understand that any support that might be offered beyond the scope defined there is done at the discretion of the agent or engineer and is provided as a courtesy.
If you're using one of GitLab's free options, please refer to the appropriate section for free users of either self-managed GitLab or on GitLab.com.
Note that free GitLab Ultimate Self-managed and SaaS granted through trials or as part of our GitLab for Education, GitLab for Open Source, or GitLab for Startups programs do not come with technical support. Technical support for open source, education, and startup accounts can, however, be purchased at a significant discount by contacting Sales. If you are facing issues relating to billing, purchasing, subscriptions, or licensing, please refer to Issues with billing, purchasing, subscriptions or licenses.
| Plan | Support level (First Response Time) | How to get in touch |
|---|---|---|
| All plans and purchases | First reply within 8 hours, 24x5 | Open a Support Ticket on the GitLab Support Portal and select "Licensing and Renewals Problems" |
| Plan | Support Level | How to get in touch |
|---|---|---|
| Core | Community Support | Open a thread in the GitLab Community Forum |
| Premium and Ultimate | Priority Support Tiered reply times based on definitions of support impact |
Open a Support Ticket on the GitLab Support Portal For emergency requests, see the note in the How to Trigger Emergency Support |
| US Federal | US Federal Support | Open a Support Ticket on the GitLab Support Portal For emergency requests, see the note in the US Federal Support description |
| Plan | Support Level | How to get in touch |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Community Support | Open a thread in the GitLab Community Forum |
| Premium and Ultimate | Priority Support Tiered reply times based on definitions of support impact |
Open a Support Ticket on the GitLab Support Portal |
These plans are no longer offered for new purchases, but still maintain their historical support levels.
| Plan | Support Level | How to get in touch |
|---|---|---|
| Bronze (GitLab.com) | Standard Support Reply within 24 hours 24x5 |
Open a Support Ticket on the GitLab Support Portal |
| Starter (GitLab Self-managed) | Standard Support Reply within 24 hours 24x5 |
Open a Support Ticket on the GitLab Support Portal |
If you're a registered GitLab Partner you'll want to take a look at the relevant GitLab Support - Partnerships section for detailed instructions for how to get in touch with Support.
| Type | Support Level | How to get in touch |
|---|---|---|
| Open Partners | Standard Support or Priority Support depending on customer's license type | Open a Support Ticket using the GitLab Support Portal - Open Partner Form |
| Select Partners | Priority Support | Open a Support Ticket using the GitLab Support Portal - Select Partner Form |
| Alliance Partners | Priority Support | Open a Support Ticket using the GitLab Support Portal - Alliance Partner Form |
Depending on how you purchased, upon the creation of your first ticket GitLab Support may not be able to automatically detect your support entitlement. If that's the case, you will be asked to provide evidence that you have an active license or subscription.
To ensure that we can match you with your GitLab.com subscription when opening a support ticket, please:
To ensure that we can match you with your Self-managed license when opening a support ticket, please:
/admin/licensesudo gitlab-rake gitlab:license:info/admin/license page (GitLab 13.2+)/admin/subscription pageAccount setup can happen one of two ways:
You can keep track of all of your tickets and their current status using the GitLab Support Portal! We recommend using the Support Portal for a superior experience managing your tickets. To learn more about using the Support Portal, watch this video on using Zendesk as an end user.
Occasionaly, you may find the Support Portal not acting as expected. This is often caused by the user’s setup. When encountering this, the recommended course of action is:
[*.]zendesk.com[*.]zdassets.com[*.]gitlab.comTicket support is available in the following languages:
Should you be offered a call, only English is available.
NOTE: Any attached media used for ticket resolution must be sent in English.
Trial licenses do not include support at any level. If part of your evaluation of GitLab includes evaluating support expertise or SLA performance, please consider contacting Sales to discuss options.
Standard Support is included in Legacy GitLab self-managed Starter, and GitLab.com Bronze plans. It includes 'Next business day support' which means you can expect a reply to your ticket within 24 hours 24x5. (See Support Staffing Hours).
Please submit your support request through the support web form. When you receive your license file, you will also receive an email address to use if you need to reach Support and the web form can't be accessed for any reason.
Priority Support is included with all self-managed and SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate purchases. These plans receive Tiered Support response times:
| Support Impact | First Response Time SLA | Hours | How to Submit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency (Your GitLab instance is completely unusable) | 30 minutes | 24x7 | Please trigger an emergency |
| Highly Degraded (Important features unavailable or extremely slow; No acceptable workaround) | 4 hrs | 24x5 | Please submit requests through the support web form. |
| Medium Impact | 8 hrs | 24x5 | Please submit requests through the support web form. |
| Low Impact | 24 hrs | 24x5 | Please submit requests through the support web form. |
Self-managed Premium and Ultimate may also receive:
To trigger emergency support you must send a new email to the emergency contact address provided with your GitLab license. When your license file was sent to your licensee email address, GitLab also sent a set of addresses to reach Support for emergency requests. You can also ask your Technical Account Manager or sales rep for these addresses.
It is preferable to include any relevant screenshots/logs in the initial email. However if you already have an open ticket that has since evolved into an emergency, please include the relevant ticket number in the initial email.
Once an emergency has been resolved, GitLab Support will close the emergency ticket. If a follow up is required post emergency, GitLab Support will either continue the conversation via a new regular ticket created on the customer's behalf, or via an existing related ticket.
Scaled architecture is defined as any GitLab installation that separates services for the purposes of resilience, redundancy or scale. As a guide, our 2,000 User Reference Architecture (and higher) would fall under this category.
Priority Support is required to receive assistance in troubleshooting a scaled implementation of GitLab.
In Omnibus and Source installations, Scaled Architecture is any deployment with multiple GitLab application nodes. This does not include external services such as Amazon RDS or ElastiCache.
| Service | Scaled Architecture | Not Scaled Architecture |
|---|---|---|
| Application (GitLab Rails) | Using multiple application nodes to provide resillience, scalability or availability | Using a single application node |
| Database | Using multiple database servers with Consul and PgBouncer | Using a single separate database or managed database service |
| Caching | Using Redis HA across multiple servers with Sentinel | Using a single separate server for Redis or a managed Redis service |
| Repository / Object Storage | Using one or more separate Gitaly nodes. Using NFS across multiple application servers. | Storing objects in S3 |
| Job Processing | Using one or more separate Sidekiq nodes | Using Sidekiq on the same host as a single application node |
| Load Balancing | Using a Load Balancer to balance connections between multiple application nodes | Using a single application node |
| Monitoring | Not considered in the definition of Scaled Architecture | Not considered in the definition of Scaled Architecture |
These hours are the SLA times when selecting 'All Regions' for 'Preferred Region for Support'.
When submitting a new ticket, you will select a 'preferred region for support'. This helps us assign Support Engineers from your region and means you'll be more likely to receive replies in your business hours (rather than at night). If you choose a preferred region, the Support Hours for the purposes of your ticket SLA are as follows:
Customers who select 'All regions' as their preferred region will receive SLAs of 24x5 as described above.
24 hours after a ticket is Solved or automatically closed due to a lack of activity, a Customer Satisfaction survey will be sent out. We track responses to these surveys through Zendesk with a target of 95% customer satisfaction.
Support Management regularly reviews responses, and may contact customers who leave negative reviews for more context.
GitLab does not offer support via inbound or on-demand calls.
GitLab Support Engineers communicate with you about your tickets primarily through updates in the tickets themselves. At times it may be useful and important to conduct a call, video call, or screensharing session with you to improve the progress of a ticket. The support engineer may suggest a call for that reason. You may also request a call if you feel one is needed. Either way, the decision to conduct a call always rests with the support engineer, who will determine:
Once the decision has been made to schedule a call, the support engineer will:
NOTE: Calls scheduled by GitLab Suport are on the Zoom platform. If you cannot use Zoom, you can request a Cisco Webex link. If neither of these work for you, GitLab Support can join a call on the following platforms: Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Zoom, Cisco Webex. Other video platforms are not supported.
Please Note: Attempts to reuse a previously-provided scheduling link to arrange an on-demand call will be considered an abuse of support, and will result in such calls being cancelled.
It's useful to know the difference between a support ticket opened through our Support Portal vs. an issue on GitLab.com.
For customers with a license or subscription that includes support, always feel free to contact support with your issue in the first instance via the Support Portal. This is the primary channel the support team uses to interact with customers and it is the only channel that is based on an SLA. Here, the GitLab support team will gather the necessary information and help debug the issue. In many cases, we can find a resolution without requiring input from the development team. However, sometimes debugging will uncover a bug in GitLab itself or that some new feature or enhancement is necessary for your use-case.
This is when we create an issue on GitLab.com - whenever input is needed from developers to investigate an issue further, to fix a bug, or to consider a feature request. In most cases, the support team can create these issues on your behalf and assign the correct labels. Sometimes we ask the customer to create these issues when they might have more knowledge of the issue or the ability to convey the requirements more clearly. Once the issue is created on GitLab.com it is up to the product managers and engineering managers to prioritize and drive the fix or feature to completion. The support team can only advocate on behalf of customers to reconsider a priority. Our involvement from this point on is more minimal.
Once an issue is handed off to the development team through an issue in a GitLab tracker, the support team will close out the support ticket as Solved even if the underlying issue is not resolved. This ensures that issues remain the single channel for communication: customers, developers and support staff can communicate through only one medium.
Building on the above section, when bugs, regressions, or any application behaviors/actions not working as intended are reported or discovered during support interactions, the GitLab Support Team will create issues in GitLab project repositories on behalf of our customers.
For feature requests, both involving the addition of new features as well as the change of features currently working as intended, support will request that the customer create the issue on their own in the appropriate project repos.
As best you can, please help the support team by communicating the issue you're facing, or question you're asking, with as much detail as available to you. Whenever possible, include:
We expect for non-emergency tickets that GitLab administrators will take 20-30 minutes to formulate the support ticket with relevant information. A ticket without the above information will reduce the efficacy of support.
In subsequent replies, the support team may ask you follow-up questions. Please do your best read through the entirety of the reply and answer any such questions. If there are any additional troubleshooting steps, or requests for additional information please do your best to provide it.
The more information the team is equipped with in each reply will result in faster resolution. For example, if a support engineer has to ask for logs, it will result in more cycles. If a ticket comes in with everything required, multiple engineers will be able to analyze the problem and will have what is necessary to further escalate to developers if so required.
If your ticket contains language that goes against the GitLab Community Code of Conduct, you'll receive the following response and have your ticket closed:
Hello,
While we would usually be very happy to help you out with any issue, we cannot assist you on this ticket due to the language used not adhering to the GitLab Community Code of Conduct. As noted in our Statement of Support, we're closing this ticket.
Please create a new ticket that complies with our guidelines and one of our support engineers will be happy to assist you.
Thank you,
Repeat violations may result in termination of your support contract and/or business relationship with GitLab.
Some organizations use 3rd party services to encrypt or automatically expire messages. As a matter of security, please do not include any sensitive information in the body or attachments in tickets. All interactions with GitLab Support should be in plain-text.
GitLab Support Engineers will not click on URLs contained within tickets or interact with these type of 3rd party services to provide support. If you do send such a reply, an engineer will politely ask you to submit your support ticket in plain text, and link you to this section of our Statement of Support.
If there's a pressing reason for which you need to send along an encrypted file or communication, please discuss it with the Engineer in the ticket.
Many common file formats, such as Microsoft Office files and PDF, can contain executable code which can be run automatically when the file is opened. As a result, these types of files are often used a computer attack vector.
GitLab Support Engineers will not download files or interact with these type of files. If you send a file in a format of concern, an engineer will ask you to submit your attachments in an accepted format, and link you to this section of the Support page.
Examples of acceptable formats include:
Do not share login credentials for your GitLab instance to the support team. If the team needs more information about the problem, we will offer to schedule a call with you.
If relevant to the problem and helpful in troubleshooting, a GitLab Support Engineer will request information regarding configuration files or logs.
We encourage customers to sanitize all secrets and private information before sharing them in a GitLab Support ticket.
Sensitive items that should never be shared include:
There's more specific information on the dedicated handling sensitive information with GitLab Support page.
GitLab Support may request logs in Support tickets or ask you to screenshare in customer calls if it would be the most efficient and effective way to troubleshoot and solve the problem.
Under certain circumstances, sharing logs or screen sharing may be difficult or impossible due to our customers' internal network security policies.
GitLab Support will never ask our customers to violate their internal security policies, but Support Engineers do not know the details of our customers' internal network security policies.
In situations where internal or network security policies would prevent you from sharing logs or screen sharing with GitLab Support, please communicate this as early as possible in the ticket so we can adjust the workflows and methods we use to troubleshoot.
Customer policies preventing the sharing of log or configuration information with Support may lengthen the time to resolution for tickets.
Customer policies preventing screen sharing during GitLab Support customer calls may impact a Support Engineer's ability to resolve issues during a scheduled call.
Our Support Portal will automatically drop any CCed email addresses for tickets that come in via email. If you would like to include colleagues in a support interaction, there are two ways:
To view tickets you have been CCed on, navigate to Profile Icon > My activities > Requests I'm CC'd on.
If a customer explains that they are satisfied their concern is being addressed properly in an issue created on their behalf, then the conversation should continue within the issue itself, and GitLab support will close the support ticket. Should a customer wish to reopen a support ticket, they can simply reply to it and it will automatically be reopened.
A user can solve a ticket themselves by logging into the Support Portal and navigating to the My activities page. From there the user can select one of their tickets that is in an open or pending state, navigate to the bottom of the ticket notes section, check the Please consider this request solved box and press Submit. If the user would like to reopen the case they can simply respond with a new comment and the case will reopen or create a follow up case.
If a customer requests assistance in migrating their existing self-hosted GitLab to a new instance, you can direct them to our Migrating between two self-hosted GitLab Instances documentation. Support will assist with any issues that arise from the GitLab migration. However, the setup and configuration of the new instance, outside of GitLab specific configuration, is considered out of scope and Support will not be able to assist with any resulting issues.
To prevent an accumulation of tickets for which we have not received a response within a specific timescale, we have established the following process. If the ticket owner (our customer) fails to respond within 20 days following our last reply, our ticketing system will mark the ticket as solved. If the ticket owner (our customer) fails to respond within 7 days of the ticket being marked as solved, our ticketing system will proceed to close the ticket.
If you are unable to sign into your account we can help you regain access. This service is only available for paid users (you are part of paid group or paid user namespace).
Forgotten password?
Locked out by 2FA?
Are you on a free plan? Please read this blog post
Please note that in some cases reclaiming an account may be impossible. Read "How to keep your GitLab account safe" for advice on preventing this.
Any type of data restoration is currently a manual and time consuming process lead by GitLab’s infrastructure team. Our infrastructure team clearly states that “once a project is deleted it cannot be restored”.
We encourage customers to use:
GitLab will consider restoration requests only when the request is for a project or group that is part of a paid plan with an active subscription applied, and one of the following is true:
Please note that user accounts and individual contributions cannot be restored.
GitLab will not act as an arbitrator of Group or Account ownership disputes. Each user and group owner is responsible for ensuring that they are following best practices for data security.
As GitLab subscriptions are generally business-to-business transactions, in the event that a former employee has revoked company access to a paid group, please contact GitLab Support for recovery options.
Per the GitLab Terms of Service:
Account name squatting is prohibited by GitLab. Account names on GitLab are administered to users on a first-come, first-serve basis. Accordingly, account names cannot be held or remain inactive for future use.
The GitLab.com Support Team will consider a namespace (user name or group name) to fall under the provisions of this policy when the user has not logged in or otherwise used the namespace for an extended time.
Specifically:
User namespaces can be reassigned if both of the following are true:
Group namespaces can be reassigned if one of the following is true:
If the namespace contains data, GitLab Support will attempt to contact the owner over a two week period before reassigning the namespaces. If the namespace contains no data (empty or no projects) and the owner is inactive, the namespace will be released immediately.
Namespaces associated with unconfirmed accounts over 90 days old are eligible for immediate release. Group namespaces that contain no data and were created more than 6 months ago are likewise eligible for immediate release.
GitLab.com namespaces are available on a first come, first served basis and cannot be reserved. No brand, company, entity, or persons own the rights to any namespace on GitLab.com and may not claim them based on the trademark. Owning the brand "GreatCompany" does not mean owning the namespace "gitlab.com/GreatCompany". Any dispute regarding namespaces and trademarks must be resolved by the parties involved. GitLab Support will never act as arbitrators or intermediaries in these disputes and will not take any action without the appropriate legal orders.
Due to our terms, GitLab Support cannot provide raw copies of logs. However, if users have concerns, Support can answer specific questions and provide summarized information related to the content of log files.
For paid users on GitLab.com, many actions are logged in the Audit events section of your GitLab.com project or group.
US Federal Support is built for companies and organizations that require that only US Citizens have access to the data contained within their support issues. The unique requirements of US Federal Support result in the following specific policies:
To be eligible to utilize this instance, your account manager must approve and you must meet one of the following criteria:
For more information about utilizing this method of support, please contact your Account Manager.
Due to the requirement that support be provided only by US citizens, US Federal Support hours of operation are limited to:
The US Federal instance offers emergency support. However, this is limited to the hours of 0500 to 1700 Pacific Time 7 days a week. You should receive instructions for triggering emergency support from your Account Manager.
To help ensure that non-US citizens are not inadvertently included in a support interaction, the "CC" feature is disabled. As a result, support personnel will be unable to add additional contacts to support tickets.
By request through your account manager, you may allow certain individuals in your organization the ability to view and respond to any open support tickets through the US Federal Support Portal.
Additional resources for getting help, reporting issues, requesting features, and so forth are listed on our get help page.
In the spirit of "Is it any good?" and GitLab's Value of Transparency GitLab Support publishes its performance indicators publicly.
