How to run the Gitlab pipelines periodically to ensure they are stable?

I work on multiple projects that use Gitlab pipelines for building, linting, sonar analysis, jira check and deployment, etc. Sometimes, the stage related to sonar check fails whenever that 3rd party system (SonarQube) has got a version upgrade which means project GitLab pipelines also fail and failure is impactful, especially during the release period and so on. I’m thinking of testing my GitLab pipeline every weekend (as a scheduled pipeline against dummy projects)to ensure all the stages are running smoothly because any 3rd party system version upgrade happens during the weekend only. And if something is breaking then I will come to know upfront before the start of a working day (Monday) itself.

Is there any way that I can run my scheduled pipeline in a combination i.e. by mocking some of the services (say build, test, lint, etc.) and some real stage test against 3rd party systems like Jira or SonarQube server which will ensure that my GitLab pipeline is working end to end?

You can schedule pipelines in GitLab, then it is just up to you what you do. I usually have a dedicated project with some dummy code (like “hello world” or smthng) that’s checks if the 3rd party tools are working.