 Hello, my name is Cesar Saavedra and I'm a technical marketing manager here at GitLab. In this short video, we're going to go over a feature within the release 14.1. The feature is external status checks for merge requests and this feature is beneficial for contacting external or third-party APIs that can perform a check in a merge request. This is for example, if you want to have a third party or an external party program or a SaaS, it could be on the cloud or on premise, do a check or a verification in relation to the MR and then basically report back to the MR whether it's passed or not. This is interesting in cases where you have an external system that doesn't have any specific pipeline jobs or whether you require some kind of a manual approval from another system for the MR to continue. Whether the approval comes in or not, this will not prevent the MR from being merged. Within the MR, there is a widget that will display all these external status checks so that the stakeholders can easily see whether or not these checks have been approved before continuing with the merge. The benefit here is better compliance and also better integration with systems that are outside the CICD workflow and on which the MR may depend on for approvals. Also provides a level of audit so that you can track whether or not the approvals came in from the external third-party systems. So let's see how this feature works. I've created this project called MyGo and from here we're going to define a merge request status check. So let's add a status check and we can call the service name external verification and here I've mocked an API using the service Mocky and the URL to call it I've saved when I created it and I'm going to input it here and I'm going to make this status check applicable to any branch. Very good. So now the external verification is in place. So now let's create an MR. Let's create an issue. Let's send it to me. Create an issue and let's create a merge request. Very good. So let's make a change to the application and commit to the branch. This will start a pipeline and let's go into the MR. And here this is a widget that is part of this new feature. It says that the status check there's one that is pending and this is basically the API call that we made to this mocked API and if I expand it this indicates that it's still waiting for a response from this external verification service and it will state this way until it receives a message with the following syntax right here. So basically the external service called the GitLab API and set this external status check for the specific MR so that when this is sent this will turn to green. Since the mocked API does not return status back to the GitLab MR let's use the GitLab API to do so and change this symbol to a green symbol. So first we need to find out before we can set the approval status of this external status check we need to find out what its number is and we do that by calling this other API call called status checks and this will return to us the ID of the external status check which we will need for this other call. So let's use curl. Here we can see that the external status ID is 53 and we will use that to call it here. Now by invoking this second call we are basically going to update the status this is this one here so we are set the approval status by invoking this other API. So let's do that and hopefully by doing so the status here will have changed there you go. So now you can see now that there is a green check mark next to this external status check indicating that it has passed. Very good so this concludes this technical demo. Hope you liked it. Until next time thank you.