Quickstart

Get BlameTrail monitoring your production services in four steps. By the end, you will have automated health checks, deploy tracking, suspect scoring, and Slack alerts.

Step 1: Create a service

A service represents anything your team deploys — an API, a website, a background worker.

1. Navigate to Services in the sidebar.
2. Click Add Service.
3. Fill in the details:
   • Name — A human-readable label (e.g., payments-api).
   • Environment — production, staging, or development.
   • Type — web, api, worker, database, or internal.
   • URL (optional) — The base URL of the service.
   • Repository (optional) — Link a GitHub repository to enable commit enrichment.
4. Click Save. BlameTrail creates a deploy webhook token for this service automatically.

Step 2: Add a monitor

Monitors are HTTP health checks that BlameTrail runs on a schedule.

1. Navigate to Monitors and click Add Monitor.
2. Configure the check:
   • Service — Select the service you created in Step 1.
   • URL — The endpoint to check (e.g., https://api.example.com/health).
   • Method — GET (default).
   • Expected Status — 200.
   • Interval — How often to check, in seconds (e.g., 30).
   • Latency Threshold — Maximum acceptable response time in milliseconds (e.g., 2000).
3. Click Save. BlameTrail starts checking immediately.

Step 3: Connect deploys

Send deploy events to BlameTrail so it can correlate incidents with code changes.

1. Open your service and copy the Webhook URL and Deploy Token from the service detail page. The token is shown once — store it securely.
2. Add a deploy notification step to your CI/CD pipeline.

GitHub Actions example

- name: Notify BlameTrail
  if: success()
  run: |
    curl -s -X POST "${{ secrets.BLAMETRAIL_WEBHOOK_URL }}/api/ingest/deploy" \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -H "X-Deploy-Token: ${{ secrets.BLAMETRAIL_DEPLOY_TOKEN }}" \
      -d '{
        "commit_sha": "${{ github.sha }}",
        "commit_message": "${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}",
        "branch": "${{ github.ref_name }}",
        "deployed_by": "${{ github.actor }}",
        "environment": "production"
      }'

Store BLAMETRAIL_WEBHOOK_URL and BLAMETRAIL_DEPLOY_TOKEN as repository secrets in GitHub.

Step 4: Set up Slack notifications

1. Go to Organization > Integrations.
2. In the Slack section, paste your Slack incoming webhook URL.
3. Click Save.

BlameTrail sends notifications when incidents open and resolve, including the service name, monitor, incident type, and most likely suspect deploy.

What happens next

With these four pieces in place, BlameTrail operates automatically:

• Health checks run at your configured interval.
• Incidents are created after 3 consecutive check failures (availability) or 3 consecutive slow responses (latency).
• Suspect scoring ranks deploys from the last 60 minutes by time proximity when an incident opens.
• Slack notifications fire on incident open and resolve, showing the top suspect deploy.
• Auto-resolve closes incidents after 3 consecutive passing checks.
• AI postmortems auto-draft when incidents resolve on Starter and Pro plans — timeline, customer impact, root cause, and action items, all editable before publishing.

Going further

Once the basics are working, wire up the rest of the incident response loop:

• On-call paging — reach the on-call rotation over SMS, voice (with DTMF acknowledge), and browser push, driven by escalation policies. Starter and Pro.
• Status page — publish a customer-facing status page at status.blametrail.com/<slug>, public or members-only. Post timestamped incident updates as the situation evolves.
• Postmortems — edit and publish the AI-drafted retrospective for each resolved incident.

For a deeper understanding of how these pieces fit together, continue to Core Concepts.