Why hall-monitor exists

It starts with a message in Slack - "Hey, did the thing with the login flow ship?" - simple question. But to answer it you open GitHub to check if the PR merged, then check your CI dashboard to see if the build passed, then check Vercel or whatever deploy tool your team uses to confirm it actually went out to production. Three tabs, thirty seconds (at least), and a mild sense of frustration that it's not obvious — every time.

That question comes up constantly. Not just to with developes but to everyone on a team. Managers want to know before updating stakeholders. CS wants to know before telling a customer a bug was fixed. Other engineers want to know before pulling and running the latest. And every time, the answer requires the same manual assembly of information scattered across tools that don't talk to each other.

Don't get me wrong - notifications from modern tooling helps. The GitHub Slack app for example is great, but it's siloed sending individual event notifications — a PR opened, a check failed — but they arrive as separate messages with no connection between them. By the time a PR has gone through review and CI and merges and deployed, there are a dozen notifications spread across channels and DMs and none of them tell you the one thing you actually want to know: did it ship?

So I built hall-monitor (a couple of times TBH) and core idea is simple: every PR gets a single Slack thread that tells the complete story. It opens when the PR opens and updates as things happen — CI runs, reviews come in, the PR merges, staging deploys, production deploys. By the end that single thread becomes a complete record of exactly what shipped and when. Not only that but it happens in public threads, not DMs, so anyone can answer "did it ship?" in one click.

The deploy side is the part I'm most excited about. When a deploy fires, hall-monitor opens a deploy thread that lists every PR included in that release. That's the missing link most tools don't have — knowing not just that a deploy happened, but exactly what changed. For anyone using Github we've worked around this by storing deploy SHAs and generating a compare url on the next so users with Github access can go look at the list themselves; but not everyone has access to your repo. With hall-monitor's deploy threads it's all linked back to the original PR thread - meaning you can trace anything in either direction whether you have access to the repo or not.

TBH I've built this a few times, and in a few different ways, but the motivation is always the same: I wanted it. I wanted it on every team I've been on. The pieces to do it exist — GitHub, Slack, CI — they just don't wire together automatically but hall-monitor is that wire.

It's early. There's plenty more to build. But the core loop — PR to CI to deploy, all in one Slack thread, automatically — works today. If you haven't seen a fully working version of this before, it's a bit magical. If that sounds useful to you, sign up for early access and we'll reach out when it's ready.