DEVOPS

Escalate a flapping preview smoke gate to PagerDuty

On a scheduled cadence, re-runs smoke checks against open PRs' active previews and, when the same preview keeps failing, opens a PagerDuty incident for the owning on-call.

CategoryDevOps
Enginesim
Difficultyadvanced
Triggerschedule
Steps5
Setup~25 min

How it runs

The automated pipeline, trigger to output.

  • TriggerScheduled re-check interval
  • ActionList open PRs and preview URLsGitHubGitHub
  • ActionSmoke-test each active previewHTTP webhook
  • LogicFlag sustained repeat failures
  • OutputOpen PagerDuty incident for on-callPagerDutyPagerDuty

What it does

Catches previews that stay broken instead of just failing once. On a schedule, it walks open pull requests, re-smoke-tests each one's live Vercel preview, and tracks repeat failures. When a preview has failed the gate across consecutive runs, it pages the responsible on-call through PagerDuty so a persistently red ephemeral environment becomes someone's problem before it stalls the release train.

When to use it

Use it when broken previews tend to linger unnoticed over a weekend or overnight, or when a flaky shared dependency repeatedly knocks previews offline and you want a human paged only after the failure is confirmed sustained — not on the first transient blip.

How it works

  1. 1A schedule fires the run at a fixed interval.
  2. 2A GitHub action lists open PRs and their head preview URLs.
  3. 3An HTTP step smoke-tests each active preview and records pass or fail.
  4. 4A logic branch flags previews failing for two or more consecutive runs.
  5. 5A PagerDuty action opens or updates an incident routed to the preview owner's on-call schedule.

Set it up

What you configure once, before turning it on.

  1. 1
    Connect GitHubRepos, issues, pull requests, actions.
  2. 2
    Connect HTTP webhookTrigger any URL on agent actions.
  3. 3
    Connect PagerDutyIncidents, on-call, escalations.
  4. 4
    Set each agent's modelWe leave models unset so you pick the tier — fast + cheap, or top-quality.
  5. 5
    Tune it to your dataEdit the prompts, filters, and field mappings so it matches how your team works.
  6. 6
    Test, then turn it onRun once against a sample, confirm the output, then enable the trigger.

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