GitHub Actions Failure Hour Audit

Audit GitHub Actions failure timing by day/hour to surface recurring outage windows and staffing hotspots.

Use this skill to identify when failures cluster so teams can target flaky time windows and on-call coverage.

What this skill does

• Reads one or more GitHub Actions workflow run JSON exports
• Keeps only failure-like conclusions (failure, cancelled, timed_out, action_required, startup_failure)
• Buckets failures into day/hour windows (with optional timezone offset)
• Ranks windows by severity using failure-run thresholds
• Emits text or JSON output for dashboards or CI gates

Inputs

Optional:

• RUN_GLOB (default: artifacts/github-actions/*.json)
• TOP_N (default: 24)
• OUTPUT_FORMAT (text or json, default: text)
• WARN_FAILURE_RUNS (default: 3)
• CRITICAL_FAILURE_RUNS (default: 6)
• FAIL_ON_CRITICAL (0 or 1, default: 0)
• TZ_OFFSET_HOURS (default: 0) — integer timezone shift from UTC, between -23 and 23
• WORKFLOW_MATCH, WORKFLOW_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• BRANCH_MATCH, BRANCH_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)
• REPO_MATCH, REPO_EXCLUDE (regex, optional)

Collect run JSON

bash

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

Run

Text report:

bash

RUN_GLOB='artifacts/github-actions/*.json' \
WARN_FAILURE_RUNS=3 \
CRITICAL_FAILURE_RUNS=6 \
TZ_OFFSET_HOURS=7 \
bash skills/github-actions-failure-hour-audit/scripts/failure-hour-audit.sh

JSON output + fail gate:

bash

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

Output contract

• Exit 0 in reporting mode
• Exit 1 when FAIL_ON_CRITICAL=1 and one or more critical windows are found
• Text output includes summary and top windows by severity
• JSON output includes summary, ranked windows, and critical_windows