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Track CI component usage across your organization (opens in new tab)

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GitLab 19.0 adds Components Analytics to the CI/CD Catalog, giving organizations visibility into how shared CI/CD components are adopted and which versions projects use. All tiers provide high-level usage counts, while GitLab Ultimate offers project-level version tracking and outdated-version identification. The feature helps platform teams respond to security issues, manage upgrades, and govern increasingly AI-generated pipelines.

The Visibility Gap in Shared CI

  • The CI/CD Catalog centralizes versioned, reusable pipeline components.
  • Previously, maintainers could not easily determine:
    • Whether components were being used
    • Which projects depended on them
    • Which versions were still active
  • Security fixes did not automatically reach projects using older component versions, making organizational exposure difficult to measure.

High-Level Adoption Analytics

  • Available across all GitLab tiers, including Free; introduced in GitLab 18.9.
  • Found under Explore > CI/CD Catalog > Analytics.
  • Shows, for each maintained catalog resource:
    • The latest released version
    • The number of unique projects using it in the past 30 days
    • Components available in that version
  • Helps teams prioritize maintenance, plan deprecations, and assess investment in shared CI infrastructure.

Component Usage Detail in Ultimate

  • GitLab Ultimate provides per-component drill-down analytics.
  • Maintainers can see:
    • Which projects used each component in the past 30 days
    • The version used by each project
    • Whether each project is up to date or outdated
  • This makes it easier to respond to vulnerabilities, notify project owners, open merge requests, and assess the impact of refactors or deprecations.

Native Governance Compared with Other Platforms

  • GitHub Actions lacks native organization-wide catalog analytics for reusable workflows.
  • CircleCI Insights focuses on pipeline performance rather than orb adoption and versions.
  • Jenkins Shared Libraries require custom tooling to track usage.
  • GitLab combines a governed component catalog with built-in adoption and version visibility.

Supporting AI-Generated Pipelines

  • The catalog establishes standardized CI practices, while analytics verifies whether those standards are actually used.
  • This is increasingly important as AI tools generate more production pipelines.
  • Self-Managed and Dedicated customers can mirror GitLab components and combine them with internally built components for regulated or air-gapped environments.

Organizations maintaining CI/CD Catalog components can use adoption metrics immediately. Teams needing project-level version and remediation details require GitLab Ultimate.