Overview

GitHub Copilot Inspector (Beta)

GitHub Copilot for Business / Enterprise is GitHub's per-seat AI coding assistant. The GitHub Copilot Inspector (Beta) connects via a GitHub App installed on each managed GitHub organization and reports seat inventory, usage adoption, governance policy, and content-exclusion configuration back into Liongard — so an idle seat draining budget, a governance policy silently loosened, or a subscription that quietly lapsed shows up on the same timeline as every other system Liongard watches.

What you can monitor

The GitHub Copilot Inspector collects seat, usage, and governance data for each managed organization, including:

• Seat inventory and assignment — total, active, inactive, pending cancellation, and pending invitation seats
• Org governance policy — public code suggestions, IDE chat, CLI, and seat management mode
• 28-day usage analytics by editor/IDE, language, and model
• Content exclusion rules (public preview)
• Estimated monthly cost and inactive-seat reclaim candidates

How it works

A parent launchpoint holds a single GitHub App credential and enumerates every GitHub organization the App is installed on. Liongard creates a child launchpoint for each organization, mapped to its own Liongard Environment, so seat usage and governance policy can be tracked independently per Customer. For a GitHub Enterprise Cloud account, collection can instead be scoped at the enterprise level — covering every organization under it — rather than per organization.

Benefits

• Track Copilot seat inventory and flag inactive seats (no activity in 30+ days) as right-sizing candidates.
• Monitor 28-day usage adoption to demonstrate developer-tooling ROI.
• Detect governance-policy drift — public code suggestions, IDE chat, and CLI policy changes.
• Catch a Customer's Copilot subscription disappearing entirely.

Inspector Setup Preparation

Inspector Setup:

Step 1: Register a GitHub App

1. Go to github.com/settings/apps/new (or your organization's App-creation page).
2. Name the App and, under Permissions → Organization permissions, grant GitHub Copilot Business: Read, Copilot content exclusion: Read, and Organization Copilot metrics: Read.
3. Save the App, then select Generate a private key — this downloads a .pem file shown only once. Copy the App's App ID from the top of its settings page.
4. Install the App on each GitHub organization you want to monitor (Install App > select the organization).

Step 2: Configure the GitHub Copilot Inspector in Liongard

1. Log in to the Liongard platform.
2. In Liongard, navigate to Admin > Inspectors > Inspector Types > Navigate to the GitHub Copilot Inspector > Select Add System.

Since GitHub Copilot is a multi-tenant system where a single GitHub App can be installed on many organizations, you'll set up a single "Parent" Inspector that will then auto-discover a "Child" Inspector for each organization.

Fill in the following information:

• Type of Inspector: Parent
• Environment: Select your MSP's Environment
• Friendly Name: Suggested Naming: [MSP Name] GitHub Copilot Parent
• Agent: Select the On-Demand Agent
• Inspector Version: Latest
• GitHub App ID: The numeric App ID from the App's settings page
• GitHub App Private Key (PEM): The full contents of the downloaded .pem file
• GitHub API Base URL: Leave blank for github.com. Set this only for GitHub Enterprise Cloud data-residency tenants, e.g. https://api.contoso.ghe.com
• Scope: Leave as Organization (default) to enumerate organizations the App is installed on, or select Enterprise and provide the Enterprise Slug (found at https://github.com/enterprises/<slug>) to collect at the enterprise level instead
• Scheduling: The Inspector will default to run once a day at the time it's set up. Here you can adjust the schedule
• Select Save. The Inspector will now be triggered to run within the minute.

Step 3: Child Inspector Setup

After the first run of the Parent Inspector, each GitHub organization the App is installed on will be auto-discovered and surfaced in the Discovered Systems tab on the Inspectors > GitHub Copilot Inspector page. Each organization maps one-to-one to a Liongard Environment.

• Activate or Archive your Discovered Systems by ensuring they're mapped to the correct Environment > Check the checkbox to the left of Inspector(s) > Select the Actions drop-down menu > Activate Launchpoints (or Archive Launchpoints).
• Click Save.

Troubleshooting

• 401 on any Copilot call: The App private key or App ID is wrong, or the installation token expired mid-run — re-verify the App ID and re-paste the full PEM private key.
• 404 on Copilot billing or seats: The organization does not have an active Copilot Business/Enterprise subscription — confirm in the org's own Copilot settings.
• Content Exclusion tab is empty: The organization hasn't enabled GitHub's public-preview content-exclusion feature — this is expected.
• Usage tabs are empty for a day: GitHub doesn't return usage data for days when the organization had fewer than 5 active licensed Copilot users.

Inspector FAQs