Record a critical defect

Post a critical defect from your incident process whenever something breaks in production. GitKraken computes change failure rate and MTTR from them.

Assumes you already have a GitKraken API key — if not, see Authentication.

Creating or deleting critical defects requires a key issued by an organization owner or admin. Other roles get 403.

Export your key for the session so the examples below can use it:

export GK_TOKEN="gk_tkn_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

Record a critical defect

POST /v1/insights/analytics/critical-defects records an incident without an issue-tracker sync; Change Failure Rate and MTTR read manual defects exactly like tracker-synced ones.

curl -X POST "https://api.gitkraken.dev/v1/insights/analytics/critical-defects" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GK_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "repo": "gitkraken/gitlens",
    "gitProvider": "github",
    "defectKey": "INC-2026-07-22-01",
    "severity": "Critical",
    "detectedAt": "2026-07-22T14:30:00Z",
    "description": "Checkout flow returned 500 for SSO users",
    "fixReleasedAt": "2026-07-22T18:05:00Z"
  }'

A successful create returns 201 with an empty body.

Things worth knowing:

defectKey must be unique within the organization; reusing one returns 400. It becomes the path segment used to delete the defect: 1-128 characters of letters, digits, ., _ or -, starting with a letter or digit.
severity is stored verbatim. Critical and Highest count as critical bugs, High as high bugs, and Medium, Low and Lowest fill the remaining tiers. Any other value is accepted and counts toward total bug counts but lands in no tier.
detectedAt determines which release window the defect falls into.
fixReleasedAt resolves the defect for MTTR. Omit it and the defect counts as unresolved.
The defect is attributed to a team at write time. A repository with two or more assigned teams and no designated attribution team returns 400 — designate one first.

Delete a critical defect

DELETE /v1/insights/analytics/critical-defects/{id}, where {id} is the defectKey you supplied:

curl -X DELETE "https://api.gitkraken.dev/v1/insights/analytics/critical-defects/INC-2026-07-22-01" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GK_TOKEN"

Returns 204. Only manually created defects are deletable — a tracker-synced defect returns 404.

See the API Reference for the full request schemas and every query parameter.

Record a critical defect​

Delete a critical defect​

Record a critical defect

Delete a critical defect