Question

An enterprise administrator receives complaints that a custom internal integration, which uses a GitHub App to bulk-create issues across hundreds of repositories, intermittently fails with HTTP 403 responses containing a 'You have exceeded a secondary rate limit' message. The primary hourly rate limit budget for the installation token is far from exhausted. The administrator is asked to recommend the most effective way to reduce these failures without requesting a special limit increase from GitHub. What should the administrator recommend?

Accepted Answer

Instruct the developers to add exponential backoff with retries honoring the 'Retry-After' header and to avoid concurrent content-creating requests, spacing out mutating calls

Answer

Switch the integration from a GitHub App installation token to a classic personal access token, which is not subject to secondary rate limits

Answer

Increase the GitHub App's requested permission scopes so the installation token receives a higher primary rate limit ceiling

Answer

Enable audit log streaming so the failing API requests are retried automatically from the SIEM pipeline