We have all been there. It is 2:00 AM, and your phone starts screaming on the nightstand. You squint at the screen to see a cryptic alert: "login error rate jumped 5x." Your heart sinks because you know exactly what comes next. You crawl out of bed, open your laptop, and begin the frantic detective work.
You start digging through deployment logs and scrolling through a long list of recent Merge Requests. You check Slack to see who was active late in the day. You are under maximum pressure to figure out what shipped, which change touched the login flow, and who wrote the code. It is an hour of stress and guesswork while the error rates continue to climb.
This is the "on-call tax" that every developer pays, but it does not have to be this way. To solve this, I created Backtrace, a specialized GitLab agent and flow designed to turn that hour of panic into seconds of clarity.
What is Backtrace?
Backtrace is a GitLab Duo Agent and an automated flow that does the heavy lifting for you. Instead of leaving you with a wall of recent deploys and wishing you good luck, it traces a production incident backward through the software lifecycle.
