TL;DR

Compass Digital builds technology for Compass Group North America, part of one of the world's leading food and support services companies. It uses Anyshift to connect change history, cloud state, code, telemetry, and Slack so engineers can investigate from one place. During an incident:

  • Anyshift ruled out the obvious suspect. The issue followed an infrastructure change, but the dependency path showed that the change did not affect sign-in. A rollback would not help.
  • Anyshift isolated the real failure domain. The production graph traced application sign-in → external authorization → shared single sign-on service (SSO). Telemetry showed traffic stopping at the SSO boundary and resuming after recovery. The service owner confirmed an outage during an upgrade.
Timeline showing how the recent change was cleared, incident-time evidence isolated shared SSO, and a later healthy check only showed recovery.

A recent infrastructure change looked responsible for the sign-in issue.

The alert reported a sign-in issue in a development environment shortly after infrastructure pull requests merged. Two explanations were plausible:

  • The recent change affected sign-in. The pull requests involved GitHub Actions OpenID Connect (OIDC), so the timing and identity context made them an obvious suspect.
  • A separate sign-in dependency failed. Application sign-in used a different identity mechanism, but that separation was not yet proven.

Both events involved identity and appeared close together. Before rolling back, the team needed to know whether they shared the same dependency path.

A rollback would only help if the change touched the affected path. Otherwise, it would introduce another change without addressing the issue.

An Anyshift graph query ruled out the obvious suspect.

The team needed two answers:

  • Where did the sign-in request stop?
  • Did the recent change touch that dependency?

A Compass Digital engineer asked Annie to run a root-cause analysis. Annie connected the incident report with the Anyshift production graph, code, cloud state, telemetry, and Slack.

The Anyshift graph separates the recent CI/CD identity change from the application sign-in lineage that reaches shared SSO.

Anyshift established that:

  • The login path crossed an external SSO boundary.
  • The GitHub changes only affected continuous integration and deployment, not application sign-in.
  • AWS showed no relevant deployment or configuration change on that path.

The change and the issue were close in time, but not on the same path. That ruled out rollback. It did not yet prove what had happened inside the shared SSO service.

Events in the Anyshift graph pointed to shared SSO.

The same sign-in symptom could come from the application or its shared SSO dependency. Each possibility required a different response.

  • The Anyshift graph showed where and when: Dynatrace distributed traces were placed on the sign-in dependency path. Traffic stopped at the shared SSO boundary during the incident and resumed after recovery.
  • The SSO service owner explained why: the shared service had been temporarily unavailable during an upgrade.

The Anyshift graph made these events useful by connecting each observation to the relevant dependency and incident window.

Anyshift isolated the external SSO boundary and cleared Compass Digital's changes.

The Anyshift graph preserved the incident after recovery.

By the time the team investigated, the SSO endpoint was responding again. A graph that stored only current state would show a healthy dependency and lose the interruption that explained the sign-in issue.

Anyshift kept the relevant events on the dependency path with their timestamps:

  • Interruption: authentication traffic stopped at the shared SSO boundary.
  • Recovery: traffic resumed, and the endpoint later responded normally.

Topology explains where a request goes. Events explain what happened on that path, and when. Together, they let Compass Digital query the incident window instead of treating current health as proof of past health.

The graph kept the recovered incident investigable.

Compass Digital avoided rollback by checking both path and time.

Compass Digital left the incident with more than an explanation. The team made a safer decision in the moment and kept a verified starting point for the next investigation:

  • A valid infrastructure change stayed in place. The team avoided the additional risk and validation work of an unrelated rollback.
  • Attention moved to the right dependency. Path and incident-time evidence pointed to shared SSO, giving its owner a precise issue to confirm.
  • The investigation became reusable. Annie saved the confirmed cause and the temporal lesson, so a similar sign-in issue can start with historical SSO traffic instead of the nearest change.

The service had already recovered; the investigation mattered because it protected a valid change, focused follow-up on the right service, and gave Compass Digital a stronger starting point for future incidents.