OrbitOps Incident Investigator

Inspiration

Production incidents are stressful because engineers often need to jump across merge requests, deployments, failed pipelines, issues, commits, and service ownership before they can understand what changed. The idea behind OrbitOps is to turn that scattered GitLab context into a clear incident investigation assistant.

Instead of asking engineers to manually search through GitLab during an outage, OrbitOps uses GitLab Orbit-style project knowledge to connect the dots and explain what likely happened, why it matters, and what action to take next.

What it does

OrbitOps is an AI-powered DevOps incident investigator. A user describes a problem such as “payment service failed after last night’s deployment,” and the agent analyzes relevant GitLab context including recent merge requests, pipeline status, deployment history, issues, service ownership, and related files.

It then produces a structured incident report with:

• A plain-English summary
• Likely root cause
• Supporting evidence
• Impacted services
• Recommended next actions
• Suggested rollback or follow-up steps

The goal is to reduce the time between “something broke” and “we know where to look.”

How we built it

We built a lightweight FastAPI application with a simple web interface for submitting an incident question. The backend simulates a GitLab Orbit-powered investigation flow by loading project context, ranking related engineering events, and generating an explainable root-cause report.

The project is structured so the sample context can later be replaced with live GitLab API and GitLab Orbit integrations.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was reducing the scope to something useful and demoable within the hackathon timeline. Incident management is a broad problem, so we focused on one high-impact workflow: helping engineers understand what recent GitLab activity may have caused a production issue.

Another challenge was making the output explainable. We did not want a generic chatbot answer; we wanted the agent to show evidence and recommend actions that an engineering team could actually trust during an incident.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a focused AI DevOps workflow that demonstrates how GitLab Orbit can become more than a knowledge graph. OrbitOps shows how Orbit context can power practical engineering automation for incident investigation, root-cause analysis, and faster recovery.

We are also proud that the project is simple enough for teams to understand quickly, but extensible enough to become a real developer productivity tool.

What we learned

Next, we would connect OrbitOps to live GitLab repositories using GitLab APIs and GitLab Orbit, add authentication, support real deployment and pipeline history, and allow teams to customize investigation playbooks for their own services.

Future versions could integrate with Slack, PagerDuty, Jira, and observability tools so OrbitOps can become a full incident response assistant.

What's next for OrbitOps Incident Investigator

The current version demonstrates how AI can accelerate incident investigation using GitLab context. Our next step is to integrate directly with GitLab Orbit and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform so OrbitOps can analyze live repositories, merge requests, issues, deployments, and pipeline activity in real time.

Future enhancements include:

• Real-time GitLab Orbit integration
• Automated root-cause ranking based on deployment and pipeline history
• Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations for incident response
• PagerDuty and observability platform integrations
• Team-specific investigation playbooks
• Service dependency mapping and impact analysis
• Automated postmortem generation
• AI-generated remediation and rollback recommendations

Our long-term vision is to transform OrbitOps from an incident investigation tool into an AI-powered SRE teammate that helps engineering teams detect, understand, and resolve production issues faster and with greater confidence.

Built With

• ai-agents
• css
• devops
• fastapi
• gitlab
• gitlab-duo-agent-platform
• gitlab-orbit
• html
• incident-management
• javascript
• json
• python
• rest-api
• root-cause-analysis