GitHub Actions Failure Spike Audit

Use this skill to catch workflows that recently degraded (new flaky tests, broken deploy gates, bad dependency updates, or infra outages) before they become long-running incidents.

What this skill does

• Reads GitHub Actions run JSON exports
• Groups by repository + workflow + branch + event
• Splits each group into recent runs and baseline history
• Compares recent failure rate to baseline failure rate
• Scores severity (ok, warn, critical) using spike + recent failure rate gates
• Emits text or JSON output for CI automation

Inputs

Optional:

• RUN_GLOB (default: artifacts/github-actions/*.json)
• TOP_N (default: 20)
• OUTPUT_FORMAT (text or json, default: text)
• RECENT_RUNS (default: 4)
• MIN_RECENT_RUNS (default: 3)
• MIN_BASELINE_RUNS (default: 4)
• WARN_SPIKE_PCT (default: 15)
• CRITICAL_SPIKE_PCT (default: 30)
• WARN_RECENT_FAILURE_RATE (default: 25)
• CRITICAL_RECENT_FAILURE_RATE (default: 45)
• WORKFLOW_MATCH (regex, optional)
• WORKFLOW_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• BRANCH_MATCH (regex, optional)
• BRANCH_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• EVENT_MATCH (regex, optional)
• EVENT_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• REPO_MATCH (regex, optional)
• REPO_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• FAIL_ON_CRITICAL (0 or 1, default: 0)

Collect run JSON

gh run view <run-id> --json databaseId,workflowName,event,conclusion,headBranch,headSha,createdAt,updatedAt,startedAt,url,repository \
  > artifacts/github-actions/run-<run-id>.json

Run

Text report:

RUN_GLOB='artifacts/github-actions/*.json' \
RECENT_RUNS=8 \
WARN_SPIKE_PCT=12 \
bash skills/github-actions-failure-spike-audit/scripts/failure-spike-audit.sh

JSON output + fail gate:

RUN_GLOB='artifacts/github-actions/*.json' \
OUTPUT_FORMAT=json \
FAIL_ON_CRITICAL=1 \
bash skills/github-actions-failure-spike-audit/scripts/failure-spike-audit.sh

Run against bundled fixtures:

RUN_GLOB='skills/github-actions-failure-spike-audit/fixtures/*.json' \
bash skills/github-actions-failure-spike-audit/scripts/failure-spike-audit.sh

Output contract

• Exit 0 in report mode (default)
• Exit 1 when FAIL_ON_CRITICAL=1 and one or more groups are critical
• Text mode prints summary + ranked failure-rate spike groups
• JSON mode prints summary + ranked groups + critical groups