Deploy Tracking
Overview
How BlameTrail tracks deploys, enriches them with GitHub metadata, and uses temporal proximity to identify suspect code changes when incidents occur.
Deploy tracking is a core part of how BlameTrail connects incidents to the code changes that caused them. Every time your team deploys, BlameTrail records the event, enriches it with context from GitHub, and holds it ready for suspect scoring the moment something goes wrong.
How it works
The deploy tracking pipeline has four stages:
- Ingest — Your CI/CD pipeline sends a deploy event to BlameTrail via a webhook. The event includes the commit SHA, branch, deployer, environment, and an optional list of commits.
- Link — BlameTrail associates the deploy with the correct service based on the webhook token. Each token is scoped to a single service and tenant.
- Enrich — If the service is linked to a GitHub repository and a GitHub token is configured, BlameTrail fetches additional metadata in the background: full commit messages, linked pull request titles, authors, and changed files ranked by relevance.
- Score — When an incident opens, BlameTrail examines all deploys to the affected service from the last 60 minutes and ranks them by time proximity to the first failure. The result is a prioritized list of suspect deploys with full context.
What gets recorded
Each deploy event captures:
| Field | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
commit_sha | Yes | The Git commit SHA that was deployed |
commit_message | No | The head commit message |
branch | No | The branch that was deployed |
deployed_by | No | Who triggered the deploy |
environment | No | Target environment (e.g., production, staging) |
version | No | A version string or tag |
description | No | Free-text description of the deploy |
url | No | Link to the deploy in your CI/CD system |
commits | No | Array of commits included in the deploy |
Why it matters
Without deploy data, incident investigation starts with a blank page. With it, BlameTrail can answer the question your team asks first: "What changed?"
- Suspect scoring immediately surfaces the most likely cause when an incident opens, cutting triage time from minutes to seconds.
- Commit enrichment adds PR context and changed file lists so you can evaluate suspects without leaving BlameTrail.
- AI summaries reference suspect deploys and their changes, providing a narrative explanation of what likely went wrong.
- Timeline view shows deploys alongside incidents on a unified timeline, making it easy to spot patterns.
Next steps
- Webhook Setup — Send deploy events from your CI/CD pipeline.
- Commit Enrichment — Fetch GitHub metadata for richer context.
- Suspect Scoring — Understand how BlameTrail ranks suspect deploys.