Causal Pull Request Analysis
When an application-level incident occurs, Kestrel automatically identifies which recently merged pull requests or commits likely introduced the breaking change.
Root cause analysis tells you what broke in your stack — a pod is OOMKilled, a service is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff, resource limits are misconfigured. But now you need to know what caused it. Your team opens GitHub, scrolls through recent PRs, reads diffs, and tries to determine what commit hash landed the change that broke this service.
Today, we're launching Causal Pull Request Analysis. When Kestrel detects an application-level incident, it automatically investigates your recent pull requests and commits to identify the changes that likely introduced the problem.
From Root Cause to Code Change
After Kestrel completes root cause analysis for an application-level failure, a background investigation kicks off automatically. Kestrel discovers your connected GitHub and GitLab repositories, looks at the incident context — the root cause summary, stack traces, and suspected source files — and starts reviewing recently merged pull requests and commits to find what introduced the issue.
It doesn't delay the incident investigation or block your team from reviewing and applying fixes. These causal investigations typically finish by the time you're done reading the RCA.
AI-Powered Investigation
Kestrel runs an AI investigation the same way a senior engineer would approach it, but faster. The agent reviews the list of recently merged PRs and commits, fetches the actual diffs for the most promising candidates, cross-references changed files against the incident's stack trace and suspected source files, and iterates until it's confident in its findings.
The result is one or more pull requests or commits that Kestrel believes introduced the breaking change, each with a plain-English explanation of why it's suspected.
GitHub & GitLab
Causal PR analysis works with both GitHub and GitLab. If your team uses both, Kestrel can look at everything. It investigates across all connected repositories automatically. It also catches direct commits that bypass the pull request process entirely, so nothing slips through.
Results You Can Act On
Causal PRs appear directly in the incident detail page as cards with everything you need: a clickable link to the pull request or commit on GitHub/GitLab, the author, when it was merged, which files were changed, and Kestrel's explanation of why this change is connected to the incident.
If you've connected Slack, the incident notification is also updated in-place with the causal PR findings.
Getting Started
If you've already connected your GitHub or GitLab repositories via Integrations → CI/CD, causal PR analysis is enabled automatically for all application-level incidents. No additional configuration required.