It’s 2:00 AM. Your phone buzzes. Production is down, the checkout service is throwing 500 errors, and your team is scrambling.
You pull up the incident, and the real pain begins. Which recent merge request broke this? Was it the payment service? The quota logic? A pipeline configuration? You’re manually hopping between GitLab issues, file diffs, CI/CD logs, and deployment histories while revenue bleeds.
This is the hidden cost of production incidents: the hours of manual, forensic archaeology required before anyone even knows what to fix.
For the GitLab Transcend Hackathon, I wanted to solve this exact problem. I built the Incident Root Cause Flow—an open-source, AI-powered agent that natively traverses GitLab's Orbit knowledge graph to find the guilty commit in seconds.
Here is how it works, how it leverages graph traversal, and how you can install it in your own GitLab projects.
