Integrating GitHub with Span

Last updated: June 9, 2026

Overview

The GitHub integration is one of the foundational data sources in Span. It captures the full lifecycle of your engineering work — from the first commit through code review, merge, and deployment — enabling Span to compute pull request, code quality, contributor activity, and DORA metrics across your organization.

Span supports both GitHub Cloud (github.com) and will be launching support for GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) in the summer of 2026.

Setting Up the Integration

Step 1 — Connect GitHub

Navigate to Settings → Integrations in Span.
Click Connect next to GitHub.
You'll be redirected to GitHub to authorize the Span GitHub App.

Step 2 — Install the GitHub App

During the authorization flow, you'll choose whether to grant access to:

All repositories in your organization, or
Selected repositories only

Span will only ever access repositories within the scope you grant.

Step 3 — Start Syncing

Once authorized, Span begins ingesting data from your repositories. Initial historical backfill may take some time depending on the size of your organization.

Multi-organization support: You can connect multiple GitHub organizations to a single Span workspace. Each organization's data is kept separate.

Permissions Required

The Span GitHub App uses read-only permissions only. It never writes to, modifies, or deletes data in your GitHub account.

Permission	Access	Purpose
`contents`	Read	Repository contents and code
`pull_requests`	Read	PR metadata, reviews, and comments
`deployments`	Read	Deployment events for DORA metrics
`issues`	Read	Issue linking to PRs
`members`	Read	Organization membership and team structure
`metadata`	Read	Repository names, branches, creation dates
`organization_administration`	Read	Org-level settings
`organization_copilot_seat_management`	Read	Copilot seat assignments (optional)
`organization_projects`	Read	GitHub Projects data
`repository_projects`	Read	Repository-level projects
`statuses`	Read	Commit status checks

Data Collected

Span reads the following data from GitHub:

Pull Requests

Title, description, status, and labels
All timestamps (opened, ready for review, merged, closed)
Full PR timeline events (review requests, approvals, dismissals, etc.)
File-level diffs (additions and deletions)

Code Reviews

Review state per reviewer (approved, changes requested, commented, dismissed)
Inline code comments and general PR comments
Review request history

Commits

Commit messages, authors, and timestamps
Commit-to-PR association

Repositories & Organization

Repository metadata (name, owner, default branch, visibility)
Organization teams and team membership
User accounts and organization membership

GitHub Copilot (optional)

Copilot seat assignments and activity
Accepted code suggestions (lines of code)

Metrics Powered by GitHub

PR Cycle Time

Span breaks down the full PR lifecycle into granular time intervals:

Interval	Definition
Coding	First commit → PR opened
Awaiting First Review	PR opened → first review
Reworking	First review → last action (addressing feedback)
Idling	Last action → merge
Deploying	Merge → production (requires deployment tracking)
Lead Time for Changes	First commit → production (requires deployment tracking)

Pull Request Metrics

PRs Merged / Week — Merge frequency per contributor
Weighted PRs / Week — PR volume scaled by size and complexity
PR Size — Lines added and removed per PR
% of PRs Merged Without Review — PRs merged without a human reviewer
% of PRs Merged With Tests — PRs that include test file changes
PR Revert Rate — Percentage of merged PRs subsequently reverted
PR Review Cycles — Number of back-and-forth interactions between author and reviewers
PR Link Rate — Percentage of PRs linked to a tracked issue
Est. Bug PR Density — Estimated bug escape rate based on bugfix PR analysis

Code Review Metrics

PRs Reviewed / Week — Reviews completed per contributor
Review Response Time — Average time to complete a review after being requested
Comments Authored / Week — Review feedback volume per contributor
Comments Received / PR — Average number of comments received per PR

Commit & Activity Metrics

Commit Days / Week — Days per week with at least one commit
Lines of Code — Total lines added and removed

DORA Metrics (require additional integrations)

These metrics combine GitHub data with your deployment and incident management tools (e.g., PagerDuty, Incident.io, Rootly):

Metric	Additional Integration Needed
Deployment Frequency	Deployment tracking
Lead Time for Changes	Deployment tracking
Change Failure Rate	Incident management
Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)	Incident management

AI Impact Metrics (require Copilot integration)

AI Code Ratio — Share of merged lines detected as AI-generated (supports Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Ruby, Java, C#, Go, Kotlin, Swift)
Accepted AI Lines vs. All Merged Lines — AI code as a percentage of total output
AI Days / Week — Days per week with AI tool activity per contributor
Gen AI Weekly / Monthly Active Users — Copilot adoption across the organization

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Span store my source code? Span reads diffs to compute code-level metrics (e.g., lines of code, AI code detection) but does not store the full contents of your source code.

How fresh is the data? Data is synced continuously. Most metrics reflect activity within minutes of it occurring in GitHub.

Can I restrict which repositories Span accesses? Yes. During GitHub App installation you can choose specific repositories, and this can be updated at any time from your GitHub organization settings.

Does Span support GitHub Enterprise Server? Yes. Span supports both GitHub Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) deployments.

💡 Tip: The GitHub integration works best when paired with an issue tracker (Jira, Linear) for issue-linking metrics and a deployment/incident tool (PagerDuty, Rootly) for complete DORA metrics coverage.