[deep-report] Investigate Deployment Incident Monitor: 100 runs/day at 8% success = ~92 wasted invocations/day (zombie pattern)

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Context

The DeepReport 2026-05-17 (#32887) flagged: "Deployment Monitor: 100 runs/day at 8% success rate = ~92 wasted invocations/day (zombie pattern)". The Copilot Session Insights 2026-05-18 (#32986) reinforces this: 37 of 50 (74%) recent sessions ended in action_required with zero duration — workflows triggering on events they shouldn't, or blocked by a required check by default.

Hypothesis

The workflow fires on a broad event trigger but most invocations have no actionable deployment to monitor — so they correctly no-op but still consume runner minutes, observability budget, and clutter the daily-failure dashboards. The 92 daily wasted runs are the largest single source of noise in the Copilot session analysis.

Why it matters

• Action minutes: 92 wasted runs/day × ~5 min/run ≈ 7.7 hours/day of runner time
• Observability noise: Every wasted run contributes to the OTLP 401 storm and dashboard clutter
• Daily-news false-positive load: These runs surface as action_required and crowd out signal

Proposed investigation

1. Read .github/workflows/deployment-incident-monitor.md (also referenced in #33052)
2. Identify which event(s) trigger it (likely workflow_run or push)
3. Add a pre_activation gate that exits early when there is no incident state to inspect (e.g. only run when a recent workflow_run conclusion is failure for the monitored workflows)
4. Alternatively, narrow the trigger to a scheduled cadence + manual dispatch

Acceptance criteria

• Success rate climbs above 50% (≥45 productive runs out of ≤90)
• OR run-count drops by ≥80% with the same productive output

Suggested agent

Workflow Normalizer, or CI Optimization Coach — both have prior context on workflow gating.

Estimated effort

Small-medium: workflow markdown edit + a pre_activation JS gate + verify next 24h of runs.

Source

DeepReport 2026-05-17 #32887; Copilot Session Insights 2026-05-18 #32986.

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• expires on May 20, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC