• Administering projects
• Administering users
  • User impersonation
  • User identities
  • User Permission Export
  • Users statistics
  • Add email to user
• User cohorts
• Prevent a user from creating top level groups
• Administering groups
• Administering topics
  • View all topics
  • Search for topics
  • Create a topic
  • Edit a topic
  • Remove a topic
  • Merge topics
• Administering Gitaly servers
• CI/CD section
  • Administering runners
    • Search and filter runners
    • Bulk delete runners
    • Runner attributes
  • Administering Jobs
• Monitoring section
  • System Information
  • Background Jobs
  • Logs
  • Audit Events

GitLab Admin Area

The Admin Area provides a web UI to manage and configure features of GitLab self-managed instances. If you are an administrator,to access the Admin Area:

• In GitLab 16.1 and later: on the left sidebar, select Search or go to, then select Admin Area.
• In GitLab 16.0 and earlier: on the top bar, select Main menu > Admin.

Administering projects

You can administer all projects in the GitLab instance from the Admin Area’s Projects page.

To access the Projects page:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Projects.
4. Select the All, Private, Internal, or Public tab to list only projects of that criteria.

By default, all projects are listed, in reverse order of when they were last updated. For each project, the following information is listed:

• Name
• Namespace
• Description
• Size, updated every 15 minutes at most

Projects can be edited or deleted.

To edit a project’s name or description:

1. In the Projects overview, next to the project you want to edit, select Edit.
2. Edit the Project name or Project description.
3. Select Save Changes.

To delete a project:

1. In the Projects overview, next to the project you want to delete, select Delete.

The list of projects can be sorted by:

• Updated date
• Last created
• Name
• Most stars
• Oldest created
• Oldest updated
• Largest repository

A user can choose to hide or show archived projects in the list.

In the Filter by name field, type the project name you want to find, and GitLab filters them as you type.

To filter only projects in that namespace, select from the Namespace dropdown list.

You can combine the filter options. For example, to list only public projects with score in their name:

1. Select the Public tab.
2. Enter score in the Filter by name… input box.

Administering users

You can administer all users in the GitLab instance from the Admin Area’s Users page:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Users.

To list users matching a specific criteria, select one of the following tabs on the Users page:

• Active
• Admins
• 2FA Enabled
• 2FA Disabled
• External
• Blocked
• Deactivated
• Without projects

For each user, the following are listed:

1. Username
2. Email address
3. Project membership count
4. Group membership count (introduced in GitLab 13.12)
5. Date of account creation
6. Date of last activity

To edit a user, in the user’s row, select Edit. To delete the user, or delete the user and their contributions, select the cog dropdown list in that user’s row, and select the desired option.

To change the sort order:

1. Select the sort dropdown list.
2. Select the desired order.

By default the sort dropdown list shows Name.

To search for users, enter your criteria in the search field. The user search is case insensitive, and applies partial matching to name and username. To search for an email address, you must provide the complete email address.

User impersonation

An administrator can “impersonate” any other user, including other administrators. This allows the administrator to “see what the user sees,” and take actions on behalf of the user. You can impersonate a user in the following ways:

• Through the UI:
  1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
  2. Select Admin Area.
  3. On the left sidebar, select Overview > Users.
  4. From the list of users, select a user.
  5. Select Impersonate.
• With the API, using impersonation tokens.

All impersonation activities are captured with audit events.

By default, impersonation is enabled. GitLab can be configured to disable impersonation.

User identities

When using authentication providers, administrators can see the identities for a user:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Users.
4. From the list of users, select a user.
5. Select Identities.

This list shows the user’s identities, including SCIM identities. Administrators can use this information to troubleshoot SCIM-related issues and confirm the identities being used for an account.

User Permission Export

An administrator can export user permissions for all users in the GitLab instance from the Admin Area’s Users page. The export lists direct membership the users have in groups and projects.

The following data is included in the export:

• Username
• Email
• Type
• Path
• Access level (Project and Group)
• Date of last activity (introduced in GitLab 14.6). For a list of activities that populate this column, see the Users API documentation.

Only the first 100,000 user accounts are exported.

Users statistics

The Users statistics page provides an overview of user accounts by role. These statistics are calculated daily, so user changes made since the last update are not reflected.

The following totals are also included:

• Billable users
• Blocked users
• Total users

GitLab billing is based on the number of Billable users.

Add email to user

You must be an administrator to manually add emails to users:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Users.
4. Locate the user and select them.
5. Select Edit.
6. In Email, enter the new email address. This adds the new email address to the user and sets the previous email address to be a secondary.
7. Select Save changes.

User cohorts

The Cohorts tab displays the monthly cohorts of new users and their activities over time.

Prevent a user from creating top level groups

By default, users can create top level groups. To prevent a user from creating a top level group:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Users.
4. Locate the user and select them.
5. Select Edit.
6. Clear the Can create top level group checkbox.
7. Select Save changes.

It is also possible to limit which roles can create a subgroup within a group.

Administering groups

You can administer all groups in the GitLab instance from the Admin Area’s Groups page.

To access the Groups page:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Groups.

For each group, the page displays their name, description, size, number of projects in the group, number of members, and whether the group is private, internal, or public. To edit a group, in the group’s row, select Edit. To delete the group, in the group’s row, select Delete.

To change the sort order, select the sort dropdown list and select the desired order. The default sort order is by Last created.

To search for groups by name, enter your criteria in the search field. The group search is case insensitive, and applies partial matching.

To Create a new group select New group.

Administering topics

• Introduced in GitLab 14.4.

• Merging topics introduced in GitLab 15.5.

Topics are used to categorize and find similar projects.

View all topics

To view all topics in the GitLab instance:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Topics.

For each topic, the page displays its name and the number of projects labeled with the topic.

Search for topics

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Topics.
4. In the search box, enter your search criteria. The topic search is case-insensitive and applies partial matching.

Create a topic

To create a topic:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Topics.
4. Select New topic.
5. Enter the Topic slug (name) and Topic title.
6. Optional. Enter a Description and add a Topic avatar.
7. Select Save changes.

The created topics are displayed on the Explore topics page.

Edit a topic

You can edit a topic’s name, title, description, and avatar at any time. To edit a topic:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Topics.
4. Select Edit in that topic’s row.
5. Edit the topic slug (name), title, description, or avatar.
6. Select Save changes.

Remove a topic

If you no longer need a topic, you can permanently remove it. To remove a topic:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Topics.
4. To remove a topic, select Remove in that topic’s row.

Merge topics

You can move all projects assigned to a topic to another topic. The source topic is then permanently deleted. After a merged topic is deleted, you cannot restore it.

To merge topics:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Topics.
4. Select Merge topics.
5. From the Source topic dropdown list, select the topic you want to merge and remove.
6. From the Target topic dropdown list, select the topic you want to merge the source topic into.
7. Select Merge.

Administering Gitaly servers

You can list all Gitaly servers in the GitLab instance from the Admin Area’s Gitaly Servers page. For more details, see Gitaly.

To access the Gitaly Servers page:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Gitaly Servers.

For each Gitaly server, the following details are listed:

CI/CD section

Administering runners

You can administer all runners in the GitLab instance from the Admin Area’s Runners page. See GitLab Runner for more information.

To access the Runners page:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Runners.

Search and filter runners

To search runners’ descriptions:

1. In the Search or filter results… field, type the description of the runner you want to find.
2. Press Enter.

You can also filter runners by status, type, and tag. To filter:

1. Select a tab or the Search or filter results… field.
2. Select any Type, or filter by Status or Tags.
3. Select or enter your search criteria.

Bulk delete runners

You can delete multiple runners at the same time.

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select Overview > Runners.
4. To the left of the runners you want to delete, select the checkbox. To select all of the runners on the page, select the checkbox above the list.
5. Select Delete selected.

Runner attributes

For each runner, the following attributes are listed:

You can also edit, pause, or remove each runner.

Administering Jobs

You can administer all jobs in the GitLab instance from the Admin Area’s Jobs page.

To access the Jobs page:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to.
2. Select Admin Area.
3. Select CI/CD > Jobs. All jobs are listed, in descending order of job ID.
4. Select the All tab to list all jobs. Select the Pending, Running, or Finished tab to list only jobs of that status.

For each job, the following details are listed:

Monitoring section

The following topics document the Monitoring section of the Admin Area.

System Information

The System Info page provides the following statistics:

These statistics are updated only when you navigate to the System Info page, or you refresh the page in your browser.

Background Jobs

The Background Jobs page displays the Sidekiq dashboard. Sidekiq is used by GitLab to perform processing in the background.

The Sidekiq dashboard consists of the following elements:

• A tab per jobs’ status.
• A breakdown of background job statistics.
• A live graph of Processed and Failed jobs, with a selectable polling interval.
• An historical graph of Processed and Failed jobs, with a selectable time span.
• Redis statistics, including:
  • Version number
  • Uptime, measured in days
  • Number of connections
  • Current memory usage, measured in MB
  • Peak memory usage, measured in MB

Logs

Since GitLab 13.0, Log view has been removed from the Admin Area dashboard since the logging does not work in multi-node setups and could cause confusion for administrators by displaying partial information.

For multi-node systems we recommend ingesting the logs into services like Elasticsearch and Splunk.

The contents of these log files can be useful when troubleshooting a problem.

For details of these log files and their contents, see Log system.

The content of each log file is listed in chronological order. To minimize performance issues, a maximum 2000 lines of each log file are shown.

Audit Events

The Audit Events page lists changes made within the GitLab server. With this information you can control, analyze, and track every change.