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A trigger is how an outside event reaches an Expert. When it fires, Cosmos opens a session and drops the raw event payload in as the first message. Add and edit triggers from the Automations page in the sidebar.
Prefer not to wire triggers by hand? Describe the workflow to Cosmos Advisor instead and it wires the right trigger for you.

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Trigger Types

Triggers come in three groups:
  • First-party integrations — GitHub, Linear, Slack, GitLab, PagerDuty. Connect the integration once from the Integrations settings page; Cosmos owns the upstream registration. PagerDuty triggers pick from the PagerDuty integrations (Events API routing keys) you’ve registered instead.
  • Scheduled — a 5-field cron expression and a timezone. No payload, no filter. See Schedules.
  • Webhook — any service that can POST JSON to an HTTPS URL you mint yourself. See Webhooks.

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Adding a Trigger to an Expert

  1. Open Automations in the sidebar and click Create automation. A panel opens on the right.
  2. Pick the Expert you want to wire up from the Expert dropdown. (The Expert must already exist — create it from the Experts page first.)
  3. Under New triggers, click Add trigger and pick the type from the Choose trigger type picker, then fill in:
    • Trigger name — a human-readable label (e.g. on-pr-opened).
    • Event — for first-party triggers, the provider event name (see the reference below). Scheduled triggers show a Frequency builder instead — every N minutes, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom cron expression — plus a Timezone.
    • Filter — an optional JSONLogic expression evaluated against the raw event payload. The trigger fires only when this expression returns true.
    • Auto-archive sessions created by this trigger — toggle off when you want to keep trigger-launched sessions accessible after they go idle (useful for revisitable agent-driven sessions like a PR-author).
    • Maximum runs per minute — an optional rate limit on how often the trigger can fire.
  4. Save. Click Add trigger again to attach more triggers to the same automation.
The trigger type is fixed once a trigger is created. To change it, delete the trigger and add a new one.

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Event Type Reference

Each first-party trigger takes an Event type using the source’s native event names:
SourceEvent typesNotes
GitHubpull_request, pull_request_review, pull_request_review_comment, issues, issue_comment, push, check_suite, status, workflow_run, workflow_job, workflow_dispatchGitHub webhook event names. No reaction event — GitHub doesn’t send webhooks for emoji reactions.
LinearIssue, Comment, ProjectEach delivers action ∈ create / update / remove in the payload — filter on it.
Slackapp_mention, messageAn @-mention is delivered as both — always filter on event.type to avoid double-firing.
GitLabgitlab.push, gitlab.tag_push, gitlab.merge_request, gitlab.issue, gitlab.note, gitlab.pipelineA connected project registers these six by default; more are available on request.
PagerDuty—Routed by integration key, not event type. Filter on event.event_type (e.g. incident.triggered).
The per-source pages have the payload shapes and filter recipes for each: GitHub, Linear, Slack.

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Payload Filters

The Filter field on a trigger is a JSONLogic expression evaluated against the parsed JSON payload. Common examples: 
// Only PR opens
{"==": [{"var": "action"}, "opened"]}

// PRs targeting main
{"==": [{"var": "pull_request.base.ref"}, "main"]}

// Comments mentioning @auggie
{"in": ["@auggie", {"var": "comment.body"}]}

// Severity P0 or P1
{"in": [{"var": "severity"}, ["P0", "P1"]]}
To see the real shape of a payload before writing a filter, open the events log, filter by source and event type, and inspect a captured event. The events log is the source of truth for what your triggers actually see — use it to confirm field paths and values before pasting a filter into a trigger.

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PagerDuty — P1 Incident Triggered

PagerDuty triggers route by integration key rather than event type. Create a PagerDuty Events API v2 integration on the relevant service, register its routing key as a PagerDuty integration in Cosmos, then pick it from the PagerDuty integration dropdown on the trigger. Use the Event dropdown (incident triggered / acknowledged / resolved) and the Filter field to match specific incidents: 
{"and": [
  {"==": [{"var": "event.event_type"}, "incident.triggered"]},
  {"in": [{"var": "event.data.priority.name"}, ["P1"]]}
]}

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See Also