Rename Operations to Monitor in the project-level left navigation

Proposal

Rename Operations to Monitor in the project-level left sidebar.

Why?

Operations is a broad category label that does not match the scope of the rest of the left navigation. Most other items in the left navigation are feature names (e.g. Merge Requests, Issues, Wiki) or categories with a more targeted scope (e.g. CI/CD, Packages & Registries). In several research studies conducted on the left navigation, we have observed low task success rates for items that live under Operations.

Additionally, in upcoming releases, multiple Operations items will be moved out into separate top-level nav items labeled Deployments and Infrastructure. The majority of the remaining items are strongly associated with monitoring, observability, and incident management.

We also have a global Operations nav item that is different from the items that would remain under Operations.

Supporting evidence

In a first-click test of project-level Operations nav items, the proposed structure performed better than the existing structure. This provided justification for breaking down the Operations category.

With the decision to move 7 items out of the current Operations menu, the following items would remain:

• Metrics
• Logs
• Alerts
• Tracing
• Incidents

The remaining items are mainly associated with monitoring, observability, and incident management.

Considerations

• This change would need to come after #225307 (closed) and #246813 (closed) are complete.
• Observability may also be a fitting category name since it can cover a broader scope. However, Monitoring may be more familiar to the general population of GitLab users.
  • DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) research defines these terms as follows:
    • Monitoring is tooling or a technical solution that allows teams to watch and understand the state of their systems. Monitoring is based on gathering predefined sets of metrics or logs.
    • Observability is tooling or a technical solution that allows teams to actively debug their system. Observability is based on exploring properties and patterns not defined in advance.
• Does it make sense to go from Operations to separate items for Monitoring and Incident Management?
  • Pros: This may provide more clarity to users.
  • Cons: This would add more items to the left sidebar which could contribute to the problem of users feeling overwhelmed.

Resources

• 🕊 Dovetail project