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Show CI/CD pipeline telemetry for Observability

doc/operations/observability/ci_cd.md

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  • Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate
  • Offering: GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed
  • Status: Experiment

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When enabled, GitLab Observability automatically instruments your CI/CD pipelines, providing visibility into pipeline performance, job durations, and execution flow without any code changes.

  • Visibility into which jobs are slowing down your pipelines.
  • How pipeline performance changes over time.
  • Bottlenecks in your deployment process.

Enable pipeline instrumentation

To enable automatic pipeline instrumentation, add the GITLAB_OBSERVABILITY_EXPORT CI/CD variable to your project or group:

  1. In the top bar, select Search or go to and find your project or group.
  2. In the left sidebar, select Settings > CI/CD.
  3. Expand Variables.
  4. Select Add variable.
  5. Configure the variable:
    • Key: GITLAB_OBSERVABILITY_EXPORT
    • Value: One or more of traces, metrics, logs (comma-separated for multiple values)
    • Type: Variable
    • Environment scope: All (or specific environments)
  6. Select Add variable.

Instrumentation types

The GITLAB_OBSERVABILITY_EXPORT variable accepts the following values:

  • traces: Exports distributed traces showing pipeline execution flow, job dependencies, and timing
  • metrics: Exports metrics about pipeline duration, job success rates, and resource usage
  • logs: Exports structured logs from pipeline execution

You can enable multiple types by separating them with commas:

plaintext
traces,metrics,logs

How it works

Once the variable is set, GitLab automatically:

  1. Captures pipeline execution data after each pipeline completes
  2. Converts the data to OpenTelemetry format based on your configuration
  3. Exports the telemetry data to your GitLab Observability instance
  4. Makes the data available in your observability dashboards

No changes to your .gitlab-ci.yml file are required. The instrumentation happens automatically in the background.

View pipeline telemetry

After running pipelines with instrumentation enabled:

  1. In the top bar, select Search or go to and find your group.
  2. In the left sidebar, select Observability > Services.
  3. Select your gitlab-ci service to view traces, metrics, and logs from your pipeline executions.

The CI/CD dashboard template from GitLab Observability Templates provides pre-built visualizations for pipeline performance analysis.