How to Log Incidents and Rollbacks in CI

Marking a deployment inactive on rollback and stamping the incident id gives auditors a clear record of what was reverted, why, and by whom.

Change control covers rollbacks too. When you revert, update the GitHub deployment status and emit a structured record that links the action to an incident. This page shows the pattern; it is educational guidance for auditable remediation.

Steps

• Trigger the rollback with the target version and the incident id as inputs.
• Set the prior deployment status to inactive and the rollback to success.
• Emit a structured log line linking the rollback to the incident.

Rollback job

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      to_sha: { required: true }
      incident: { required: true }
permissions:
  deployments: write
jobs:
  rollback:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: production
    steps:
      - run: ./deploy.sh --sha "${{ github.event.inputs.to_sha }}"
      - run: |
          echo "{\"event\":\"rollback\",\"to_sha\":\"${{ github.event.inputs.to_sha }}\",\"incident\":\"${{ github.event.inputs.incident }}\",\"actor\":\"${{ github.actor }}\",\"ts\":\"$(date -u +%FT%TZ)\"}"

Notes

• Routing rollback through the same protected environment keeps separation of duties intact.
• Ship the JSON record to your SIEM so the remediation trail lives outside CI.

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