Looks pretty nice. I've been using/administering GitLab for our company, but I've always found it a bit heavy for our needs. I might give this a shot and see how it is.
1) This thread is about a kinda-competitor to GitLab, so maybe he was just here reading it.
2) There are monitoring services like: https://zapier.com/zapbook/zaps/675/post-message-slack-when-...
Add it on a decent reader, filter for the word "GitLab", and you're done.