Commit Graph
3 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jakman85andClaude Opus 5 b9f3143f42 feat(monitoring): name the CAUSE of node I/O pressure, not just the stall
NodeIOPressureCritical has now fired twice on k3s-prod-1 for opposite causes and
said the same thing both times. On 2026-09-14 02:40-02:45Z it fired at PSI(full)
20.98% — twice the threshold, four times the 2026-09-07 level — while every local
device was idle (0.09-0.27 utilisation) and fast (1.4-4.8 ms per write), NFS
retransmissions were zero and no Longhorn volume was degraded. Establishing that
took eight ad-hoc PromQL queries after the event had already recovered.

Adds the group platform-health.node-io-cause: eight rules, one per cause class,
each naming its cause in its own summary.

  NodeDiskDeviceSaturated        device saturation   >0.85 busy, 10m
  NodeDiskWriteLatencyHigh       device latency      >20ms/write, 10m
  NodeDiskWriteLatencyCritical   device latency      >50ms/write, 5m
  NodeDiskReadLatencyHigh        device latency      >250ms/read, 15m
  NodeNFSRetransmissionRateHigh  NFS transport       >1% retransmitted, 10m
  NodeIOPressureNotLocalDisk     not local disk      PSI>10% with all of the above absent
  NodeEtcdRequestsSlow           etcd                >0.5% of etcd requests over 1s
  ContainerIOStallHigh           which workload      per-container PSI >15%

Every threshold is measured on prod over 24-48h, not guessed, and each rule
records its headroom. The PSI thresholds themselves are deliberately unchanged:
the 21% stall was real, it fired twice in 24h for two real events on the one node
that has a problem, and raising the bar would also have raised it above the 11.36%
at which prod-1 was already losing etcd on 2026-09-07.

Context reaches the operator at page time three ways: the summary states the cause
class; every rule carries a diagnostic_query annotation with the exact companion
PromQL; and node-pressure-dashboard.yaml gains a WHY row (seven panels) plotting
saturation, write/read service time, NFS retransmissions, our own NFS op rate,
the etcd slow-request fraction and per-container PSI side by side. runbooks/node-io.md
gains a 10-row triage table with the real healthy / 2026-09-14 / 2026-09-07 columns,
which turns those eight queries into a two-minute read.

etcd and NFS metric availability, verified on prod rather than assumed:
  * etcd SERVER disk metrics do NOT exist. etcd_disk_wal_fsync_duration_seconds and
    etcd_disk_backend_commit_duration_seconds are absent (kubeEtcd disabled for k3s);
    a query for etcd_disk_*/etcd_server_*/etcd_mvcc_* returns nothing at all.
    NodeEtcdRequestsSlow uses the apiserver's client-side view of its own local
    member instead, and says in its own description that it is a proxy.
  * node_nfs_* DOES exist — the nfs collector is on by default, host-wide via
    /proc/net/rpc/nfs, confirmed on all three nodes. It gives op counts and
    retransmissions and NO latency, so it can see a dropping export but not a slow
    one. The mountstats collector is enabled here to close that gap; NO rule
    references node_mountstats_* yet, because the series do not exist until the
    HelmRelease rolls out and the collector's visibility through the node-exporter
    mount namespace must be verified on prod first. The runbook records the check
    and says to revert if it comes back empty.

Proof, per the repo's two shipped alerting failure modes:
  * platform/monitoring/tests/node-io-cause.test.yaml — 7 fixtures, all from
    measured profiles: healthy (all 8 quiet), 2026-09-14 (NotLocalDisk fires and
    names sonarr), 2026-09-07 re-queried at offset 164h (write-latency and etcd
    fire, NotLocalDisk correctly silent), rebuild storm, NFS transport, read
    latency, and the `unless` semantics.
  * 10 mutations of the shipped rules, all killed. The mutation run found a real
    gap: the etcd threshold could be changed without failing any test, because it
    was only pinned by a promql_expr_test that restated the threshold in the test
    file. An alert_rule_test now pins it.
  * All 11 referenced metrics verified to return series on prod with
    `promtool query instant`, and all 8 expressions verified quiet on today's state.

Also extends the alert-metrics-have-scrape-targets owner table for container_*
(the kubelet ServiceMonitor's cAdvisor path, which this entry already claimed in
its title) and for etcd_request_duration_seconds_* by EXACT NAME, deliberately not
by an etcd_ prefix, so a future rule on the unscraped etcd_disk_* names still fails
the gate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-13 22:35:19 -05:00
jakman85 efc6db6c1f feat(obs): alert on I/O pressure — the metric that missed the prod-1 outage
On 2026-09-07 06:05:21Z k3s-prod-1 went NotReady ("Kubelet stopped posting node
status") with the host up, pingable and SSH-able. The cause was disk I/O
starvation of the embedded etcd, from its own journal:

  slow fdatasync               took=3.56s / 6.71s / 4.95s / 3.40s (expects 1s)
  apply request took too long  took=8.30s                         (expects 100ms)
  etcdserver: too many requests

/proc/pressure/io FULL avg300 read 11.36 on k3s-prod-1 against 0.75 on
k3s-prod-2 (NVMe) and 1.29 on k3s-prod-3 — all three nodes put /data/k3s
(etcd's WAL) and /data/longhorn (every replica) on ONE partition, and node 1's
is a 2011 consumer SATA SSD with 61,440 reallocated sectors.

The stack alerted on CPU-PSI and memory and had NO I/O alert at all, so the
first signal the operator got was a node already out of the cluster. Adds:

  NodeIOPressureHigh      full IO PSI > 5%  for 10m  warning
  NodeIOPressureCritical  full IO PSI > 10% for 5m   critical

Thresholds are measured, not guessed: rate() is a 0-1 fraction, so the outage's
11.36% is 0.1136 and the healthy steady state on the same node is ~0.01.
Verified live that node-exporter already exports
node_pressure_io_{stalled,waiting}_seconds_total for all three prod nodes, so
these rules fire on arrival — no new exporter, no scrape change. (etcd's own
fsync histograms are NOT available: kube-prometheus-stack's kubeEtcd scrape job
is deliberately disabled for k3s, so PSI is the signal we actually have.)

PSI *full* (every runnable task blocked on disk), not *some*: `some` is noisy on
a storage node and did not separate the failing node from its peers.

Dashboard gains the matching I/O row and is retitled accordingly. Not scoped to
prod — dev shares this file and its k3s VMs are HDD-backed, where the same alert
is if anything more likely to earn its keep.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
(cherry picked from commit cb28fc80e7e2085d2539530d55f90fc92e3b1bba)
2026-09-07 02:46:26 -05:00
jakman85andClaude Opus 4.8 a720c73fcd monitoring: node CPU-pressure alerts + PSI/load dashboard (#4)
Adds NodeCPUPressureHigh (CPU PSI 'some' > 15% for 15m) and NodeCPULoadHigh (load5/core > 1 for 15m)
to platform-health.nodes, plus a 'Nodes — CPU / Memory Pressure' Grafana dashboard (PSI + load-per-core
+ utilization). These surface the bursty CPU contention that averaged CPU%/kubectl top hides — the
signal behind 'spikes cause blips of delay'. Makes the 6->8 vCPU resize measurable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
2026-08-30 21:51:15 -05:00