Use Autopilot with GitHub

preview

We're still working on this feature, but we'd love for you to try it out!

This feature is currently provided as part of a preview program pursuant to our pre-release policies.

Once you connect Autopilot to GitHub, GitHub context flows into investigations automatically. You do not have to mention GitHub. When Autopilot finds a Change Tracking event with a commit SHA during an investigation, it fetches the associated Pull Request and surfaces it as part of the response.

What you can do

When Autopilot has GitHub access and a Change Tracking event with a commit SHA, it can:

Link a deployment to a PR. Given a commit SHA on a Change Tracking event, return the associated Pull Request (number, title, description, URL).
Summarize what changed. Report the files touched and the added/deleted line counts for the PR that shipped the incident-adjacent deployment.
Answer follow-ups in the same investigation. Once the PR is on the record, you can ask Autopilot to compare it to the previous deployment or to correlate the change with the failing signal.
Run alert-triggered or manual investigations. The GitHub lookup runs the same way whether Autopilot is triggered by an alert with an SRE destination or invoked manually from Slack or the AI Chat panel.

Investigate an alert with deployment context

When an alert with an SRE destination fires and Change Tracking has a matching event, Autopilot's investigation notes the PR that shipped the change and what it touched.

Illustrative example (not a real investigation):

You: @New Relic why is <service-name> alerting?
Autopilot: Error rate on <service-name> rose sharply around <timestamp>. A Change Tracking event a few minutes earlier corresponds to PR #<number> ("<PR title>") which touched <N> files in <path> (+<additions>/−<deletions> lines). Author: <author>. Link: github.com/<owner>/<repo>/pull/<number>.

Ask follow-ups in the same thread

Continue in the same investigation thread. Autopilot keeps the PR and commit context on the record and can reason about it in follow-ups:

You: @New Relic what was the deployment before that?
Autopilot: [returns the previous Change Tracking event and, if present, the PR and commit that carried it]

Manual investigations

You can also trigger a GitHub-aware investigation manually from Slack or from the New Relic AI Chat panel. Reference the entity or the incident and ask Autopilot to investigate; the GitHub lookup runs the same way.

How Autopilot uses GitHub data

When Autopilot identifies a Change Tracking event containing a commit SHA during an investigation, it uses the following GitHub MCP tools:

Tool	What it does
`pull_request_read`	Fetches the associated Pull Request once a commit is matched — extracts the URL, title, description, and author to provide full deployment context for the root cause analysis.
`search_commits`	Searches commits using the full SHA commit value.
`search_pull_requests`	Resolves Pull Request details — including links and metadata — by querying against the commit SHA and entity name.
`list_pull_requests`	Retrieves recently merged Pull Requests from the repository to provide high-level summaries of code movement.
`get_commit`	Inspects the specific commit hash to surface the files changed and the addition/deletion line counts attributed to the deployment.
`list_commits`	Generates a chronological list of commits to help correlate specific merges with the timing of an incident.

Autopilot does the following:

Reads Pull Request metadata and commit change metadata (files changed, additions, deletions) from the commit SHA on the Change Tracking event.
Is subject to the permissions in the PAT and does not write PRs or comments, or take merge or approval actions.
Returns a synthesized summary of the PR and commit to the requesting user through the same response channel as the rest of the investigation.

Caution

Autopilot reads whatever PR metadata GitHub returns for the linked commit, including the free-text PR description body. Don't put passwords, API keys, tokens, or other credentials in PR descriptions of the repositories you connect. If a credential is ever pasted into a PR description in a connected repo, revoke it and rewrite the PR description before enabling the integration on that repo.

Important

Responses that include PR context are visible to the same audience as the rest of the investigation. If the investigation is running in a Slack thread, everyone in the thread sees the summarized PR details. Autopilot queries GitHub with the org-level token, but its replies are visible to whoever Autopilot is answering.