Working set measured at 111 MiB with a 6h peak of 123.3 MiB against a 128Mi
limit, so it died on every spike — exit 137, roughly every 11 minutes, 91
restarts in 16h.
The consequence is worse than the restarts. Thirteen alert rules read kube_*
series, so each kill made them intermittently unable to fire, which is the
quiet version of the inert-alert class found elsewhere today; KubePodNotReady
and KubeDeploymentReplicasMismatch were both sitting pending on it.
Self-inflicted: enabling customResourceState for the Velero Schedule metrics
earlier today added a CRD informer plus the mandatory CRD list/watch, and
that marginal cost crossed a limit already sitting about 4 MiB above the
working set. Raised to 384Mi, roughly 3x the observed peak, which costs
nothing on nodes reporting 18.7-22.3 GiB available.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
VeleroNoRecentBackup could not fire for the failure mode that actually happened.
`(time() - velero_backup_last_successful_timestamp{schedule!=""}) > 24*3600` is the
right SHAPE — per-schedule, un-aggregated — but Velero only creates that series once
a backup for the schedule SUCCEEDS, and `time() - <absent series>` yields no series.
So it detects "backed up once, then stopped" and is structurally INERT on "never
backed up". Prod ran with `velero-daily` (the schedule carrying VOLUME DATA) paused
and never-successful: no volume backups at all, nothing alerted, and it was masked
because `velero-daily-resources-only` completed cleanly every 03:00, so every other
backup signal read green while only Kubernetes objects were protected.
A PromQL-only fix is impossible, verified rather than assumed: velero v1.18.1 exports
35 velero_* metric names and every one carrying a `schedule` label is created by a
backup ATTEMPT, not by the Schedule object. A throwaway `paused: true` Schedule on
prod produced ZERO velero_* series, and nothing exposes `spec.paused`. The fact is
not in the TSDB, so the Schedule CRs are exported via kube-state-metrics'
custom-resource-state collector — the path this repo already uses for
kube_node_labels — as kube_velero_schedule_{created,paused,protects_volume_data,info}.
Proven by running KSM v2.20.0 with this exact config against prod's API: the CRD
list/watch rule the chart adds is MANDATORY, not cosmetic — without it KSM emits the
CRS metrics as an empty set, silently.
Three rules, all keyed on PROPERTIES rather than schedule names:
* VeleroScheduleNeverBackedUp (critical) — a Schedule older than 36h with no
successful backup ever. The 36h grace comes from creationTimestamp so a newly
added schedule is not paged before its first run is even due.
* VeleroSchedulePaused (warning) — the direct root-cause signal; a paused backup
schedule must never be silently indefinite.
* VeleroNoVolumeDataBackup (critical) — THE ANTI-MASKING RULE. Fires unless some
schedule with spec.template.defaultVolumesToFsBackup=true succeeded in 36h, so a
healthy resources-only schedule can never make the platform look protected.
Reading the property that DEFINES volume protection (not a name list) matches
platform/velero/volume-policies.yaml and survives renames. `or vector(0)` is
load-bearing: `count(<empty>) == 0` returns no series and would be inert —
absence of the exporter is deliberately the alarm.
Adds the repo's first Prometheus rule-unit-test harness (platform/monitoring/tests/,
wired as the `prom-rules` gate stage). It flattens the COMMITTED PrometheusRule CRs —
never a copy — and pins every rule in the group both ways: quiet on today's healthy
prod state, firing on the reconstructed bad state, with `for:` durations asserted.
Two mutation checks confirm the tests are not vacuous: dropping `or vector(0)` and
breaking the `unless on (schedule)` join each turn the suite red. This is the tool
that makes both of this repo's recurring alert bugs — permanently-firing and
structurally inert — provable offline, which neither yamllint, Kyverno, nor a healthy
cluster can do.
Proof of the fix is by construction; the live metrics cannot show it any more, because
`velero-daily` was unpaused on 2026-09-12 and has since completed 2492/2492 items.
The throwaway probe Schedule and the probe KSM deployment were deleted and the
deletion confirmed; `velero-daily` remains unpaused.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Minimal prod delivery, authored directly on main (= prod's live revision d1a6628)
rather than by merging work/prod-standup-campaign. That branch carries the DNS apex
inversion, which would have set prod's BASE_DOMAIN to home.keithjackson.dev; prod
runs external-dns with policy: sync and txtOwnerId: prod, so it would have begun
rewriting apex records dev owns while the non-k3s prod still serves 443 there.
Operator sequencing is "dev migrates first". Nothing under clusters/ is touched
here at all, which is what makes this safe to land now.
Also deliberately EXCLUDED, because prod's live cluster-vars has no CNPG_BACKUP_PATH
key and StrictPostBuildSubstitutions would fail the whole tier: the R2 rework of
platform/velero/ and the CNPG destinationPath changes. Those land as
feat/r2-backup-prod together with the endpoint and bucket knobs.
WHAT THIS FIXES
1. Nothing was watching CNPG. All three prod databases have run since bootstrap with
ContinuousArchiving=False and firstRecoverabilityPoint=null, and no alert existed
anywhere. Because archive_mode=on and the archive command fails, Postgres refuses
to recycle WAL: keycloak-db holds every segment ever written (257 MiB on a 5 GiB
volume, ~6.8 MiB/h) — roughly 29 days to a disk-full PANIC on the cluster's SSO
database. Found by hand, 38h late. CNPGWALArchiveBacklog would have fired within
the hour, and evaluates to 3 firing series on prod today.
Rules key on cnpg_collector_* rather than cnpg_pg_stat_archiver_*, because
nextcloud-db's exporter cannot log in to its own database (permission denied for
database "nextcloud", both clusters) so the pg_stat_archiver family does not exist
for it — the obvious metric would have been blind to one database in three.
2. No PVC outside namespace=monitoring had any fill alert. New rules are partitioned
by namespace so they cannot double-fire with MonitoringVolumeFillingUp, pinned to
job="kubelet" (the apiserver copy of the same series reports namespace=default),
and guarded by inodes > 0 — block-mode PVCs such as unifi-rootdisk report
available=0 forever and would otherwise have fired critical permanently.
3. VPNTunnelDown could never clear on a cluster with no gateway node; it has been
firing critical on prod since 2026-09-05. Now guarded so prod self-arms the moment
a node carries the egress-gateway label, with dev's behaviour unchanged today.
4. The Keycloak realm import fails OPEN: an unresolved placeholder is stored
LITERALLY and the import still reports success, then sits at Done=True and never
re-runs. On 2026-09-06 all 12 prod OIDC clients held the literal
$(env:..._CLIENT_SECRET) string and every SSO login failed, while every signal was
green. The CronJob is the level-triggered correction; two alerts make its silence
observable. Repaired live already — this stops it recurring.
Also: the R-NET-04 conformance scan descended into nested agent worktrees under
.claude/, counting 4 egress policies where 1 is authored.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
INCIDENT FIX. Prod's external-dns DELETED EVERY ONE OF DEV'S PUBLIC DNS RECORDS. Both
clusters ran policy: sync against the SAME Cloudflare zone with the SAME implicit
txtOwnerId (`default`), so prod believed it owned dev's records, found no matching sources,
and removed them plus their TXT registry entries. Dev recovered ~30s after prod was scaled
to 0; verified restored against Cloudflare directly (my first check went through a pfSense
override and falsely showed healthy — local resolvers are not evidence about public DNS).
THE MISS WAS MINE, and it was a failure of imagination in how I briefed every agent. I put
"never touch dev" in brief after brief and enforced it — separate kubeconfigs, verified
--limit, sha-checked dev's kubeconfig before and after. Every one of those guards held. NONE
of them covered SHARED EXTERNAL RESOURCES. Prod reconciling its OWN correctly-authored
manifests reached across a third party and destroyed dev's state. Cluster-to-cluster
isolation was verified; the dependency that mattered was cluster-to-Cloudflare.
Operator's architecture: dev -> *.dev.home.keithjackson.dev, prod ->
*.prod.home.keithjackson.dev, apex CNAME <svc>.home -> <svc>.prod.home.
PHASE 1 ONLY (this commit): prod moves to its own subdomain. DEV IS NOT MIGRATED and its
effective hostname stays home.keithjackson.dev, so dev renders byte-identically and nothing
live moves. That alone ends the collision and unblocks prod. Phase 2 (dev -> dev.home. +
apex CNAMEs) is deferred to when the operator is present: it relocates Keycloak's issuer and
12 clients' redirect URIs, forces a rolling k3s restart and kubectl SSO re-issue for every
user, and moves gitea.home. — which is BOTH the GitOps source and the current push target.
BASE_DOMAIN WAS A DEAD KNOB — it existed in cluster-vars but the status report flagged it as
referenced by nothing, because hostnames were hardcoded throughout. Now real: 141 refs.
Searched the AUTHORITATIVE reconciled set by resolving each Flux spec.path transitively via
conformance/lib/status.py — the same resolver the L0 gate uses, so "what Flux reconciles"
has one definition. 185 occurrences across 47 files in 154 reconciled files. Tokenized:
Gateway listeners, the wildcard Certificate, coredns-custom, external-dns, Keycloak
instance/realm (26 redirect URIs), oauth2-proxy, Grafana OIDC, all HTTPRoutes, Homepage's 15
links, 30 runbook_urls, unifi cloud-init, render.py's ZONE constant (which drove
--oidc-issuer-url/--cookie-domain/--whitelist-domain on every forward-auth sidecar) and 11
catalog/ ServiceDefinitions re-rendered canonically. Left alone: 43 comment/prose
occurrences and non-reconciled paths.
TWO THAT CANNOT BE TOKENIZED, flagged not forced:
- headlamp's OIDC URLs live inside a SOPS-encrypted Secret; re-encrypting rewrites the MAC
over every value and the OFFLINE harness cannot verify it (kustomize does not decrypt),
so an error would break live-dev SSO with no pre-flight proof. Prod needs its own copy
anyway — client secrets are realm-scoped.
- kube-apiserver --oidc-issuer-url is a k3s SERVER FLAG, not a manifest, so Flux can never
reach it. Done on the inventory seam instead (k3s_base_domain -> k3s_oidc_issuer_url,
overridden in group_vars/k3s_prod). Verified per host: dev keeps the default, prod gets
prod.home.
EXTERNAL-DNS OWNER, the actual incident cause: txtOwnerId is now explicit per environment —
dev renders exactly `default` (the chart default it was already using, so its existing
records stay recognised) and prod gets `prod`. The BASE default is a NON-COLLIDING SENTINEL,
deliberately not `default`, so a future environment that forgets the knob owns nothing and
can delete nothing rather than silently inheriting dev's identity.
I OVERRODE ONE AGENT DECISION against our own prior finding: it narrowed prod's
domainFilters to prod.home.keithjackson.dev as defence in depth. FINDING F-DNS1
(DECISIONS-LOG 2026-08-17) already proved a subdomain filter DROPS THE PARENT ZONE —
ExternalDNS generates the record then skips it with "no hosted zone matching record DNS
Name". Prod would have published NOTHING. Set to the ZONE (keithjackson.dev) like dev.
Isolation comes from the subdomain split plus txtOwnerId, which is what the incident
actually needed and what a domain filter cannot provide.
DEV PROVEN UNCHANGED: 11 of 12 substituting paths byte-identical; the 12th differs by
exactly one line, `+ txtOwnerId: default` — the value dev was already using implicitly.
POSITIVE CONTROLS confirm the harness is not blind: perturbing BASE_DOMAIN moves 10 of 12
hashes (the 2 that don't provably contain no hostname), perturbing the owner id moves
exactly 1. Prod's rendered output has ZERO home.keithjackson.dev references outside prod.,
and its cert renders *.prod.home.keithjackson.dev — no overlap with dev's.
L0 substitution assertions 106 -> 254; BASE_DOMAIN is no longer flagged dead. Gate PASS.
PROD REMAINS SUSPENDED (platform + 10 downstream tiers) pending review; nothing applied.
Serves: R-ENV-02, R-DNS-01, R-DNS-02, R-DNS-03, R-TLS-01.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Both were pinned at ~98% of their limits (Prometheus 2002/2048Mi, Grafana 499/512Mi) with no
headroom for TSDB compaction / dashboard-render spikes — the classic OOM setups. Nodes are 24Gi at
38-44% used (~14Gi free each; the '~22 GiB ceiling' comment predates the 16->24Gi node bump), so the
extra headroom is comfortable. Grafana request 256->384Mi, Prometheus request unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Text-only cleanup after the upgrade campaign. Updates stale version
strings, prose, and comments to the verified current facts; no
Kubernetes behavior or version pins changed except the kubectl
toolchain bump (below).
Verified facts applied: k3s v1.36.4+k3s1, Debian 13 trixie,
Cilium 1.20.1 / Gateway API v1.6.1, Longhorn 1.12.1, node RAM 24 GiB,
dedicated virtio2 SSD etcd disk per node, Velero chart 12.x / v1.18,
Grafana 13.2.0.
- Version strings across infra/ and platform/ READMEs + comments
- kubectl toolchain 1.31.4 -> 1.36.4 (devcontainer/ci/conformance
versions.env; 1.31 vs a 1.36 cluster exceeded the +-1 skew)
- Retired-single-apps-Kustomization refs -> apps-wave-0/1/2 + apps-vms
with per-wave SOPS decryption (flux/clusters docs + bootstrap.sh)
- COMPLETED/historical banners on the three executed plan docs
- Resolved TODO(WS-SEC) markers -> Renovate-maintained ranges
- Appended dated DECISIONS-LOG entry (2026-08-30) superseding the
2026-08-26 LIVE STATE line
Left as revalidation items (not blind-edited): external-snapshotter
v8.2.0 vs 1.36, Cilium ext_authz/forward-auth relevance under 1.20.1,
conformance ImageVolume feature-gate assertions under 1.36.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Grafana 12.x bundled in kps 88 OOMKilled (exit 137) at 256Mi during grafana-apiserver/unified-storage
startup — no fatal log, just SIGKILL. The new Grafana pod never became Ready, so Helm --wait ran the full
20m and rolled back to 65.8.1 every time. 512Mi holds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
The 65->88 multi-major upgrade exceeded the default 5m Helm timeout (full operator/KSM/
node-exporter + Prometheus/Alertmanager StatefulSet rollout), so Flux rolled back to 65.8.1
four times and Stalled, blocking the platform kustomization and everything downstream.
CRDs pre-applied server-side at operator v0.93.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
The 7 falsely-firing platform alerts (KeycloakDown, KeycloakDatabaseDown,
KubeAPIDown, KubeletDown, VPNTunnelDown, KubeVirtControlPlaneDown,
CDINoDefaultStorageClass) share ONE root cause, not per-rule label mismatches:
the Prometheus PVC is 100% full ("no space left on device" on every WAL commit).
Evidence from the live dev cluster:
- /prometheus is 4.8G/5Gi, 0 bytes free; every scrape logs "Scrape commit
failed ... write to WAL: no space left on device". Scrapes still return 200
(targets show healthy, lastScrape=now) but samples are never stored, so the
TSDB head froze at 2026-08-28 13:45 UTC while the pod clock reads ~19:33 UTC.
- Instant queries at "now" therefore return an EMPTY vector, so every
absent()/==0 platform rule trips. Evaluated at the last-good-sample time each
expr is correctly FALSE (keycloak-0/keycloak-db-1 ready=1, apiserver+kubelet
up=1 x3, tun0 series present, kubevirt control-plane expr empty, CDI default
present) — the rules are correct; the monitor was simply blind.
`retention` alone prunes only by AGE: this cluster is 3d2h old with 3d dev
retention, so time-pruning has NEVER run and 3d of block churn (~1.2Gi/day) plus
a WAL that ballooned past 1Gi overran the 5Gi disk. Fix adds a size-based
retention cap (new MONITORING_PROMETHEUS_RETENTION_SIZE knob) kept below each
env's PVC so Prometheus drops oldest blocks before the disk fills, and bumps the
dev PVC 5Gi->8Gi for real WAL/head/compaction headroom.
- platform/monitoring/kube-prometheus-stack.yaml: retentionSize: ${knob}
- clusters/base/cluster-vars.yaml: knob default 8GiB (base 10Gi PVC)
- clusters/dev/kustomization.yaml: PVC 5Gi->8Gi, retentionSize 5GiB
- clusters/prod/kustomization.yaml: retentionSize 45GiB (50Gi PVC)
- platform/monitoring/README.md: knob table + rationale
Deploy note (PM): the PVC is already 100% full, so Prometheus cannot self-prune
until it can write. The 5Gi->8Gi bump must land as a Longhorn online expansion
(operator PVC expansion / manual patch); once free space returns, retentionSize
keeps it healthy. Watchdog left untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Grafana's pod predated the grafana-oidc-credentials secret, so generic_oauth started with
an empty client_secret (disabled) → /login/generic_oauth didn't redirect to Keycloak.
Add a podAnnotation to force one roll; bump on future OIDC secret changes.
prometheus-...-0 was OOMKilled (exit 137) every ~4min during TSDB compaction/checkpoint
(261 restarts/37h). Raise limit to 2Gi + request to 512Mi; nodes have headroom.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Enable monitoring in platform/kustomization.yaml (Phase 4). Grafana admin +
Alertmanager SMTP secrets are provisioned (SOPS) and wired; Longhorn SC is up for
Prometheus/Loki PVCs. Set the Alertmanager receiver 'to:' to a valid inbox
([email protected]) so the config loads (REPLACE-ME is not a valid address);
operator can change it. NOTE: smtp_from ([email protected]) differs from
the Gmail auth user — Gmail may reject/rewrite unless a send-as alias is configured;
that only affects email delivery at alert time, not stack health.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Prep only — nothing deployed; running cluster untouched.
Reconciliation graph (operator-approved Option A): author clusters/dev/rollout/
= 4 per-component Flux Kustomizations (kyverno->cilium->longhorn->monitoring,
monitoring dependsOn longhorn). Dev overlay $patch:delete's the monolithic base
platform/apps and adds ./rollout, so only the no-secret tier reconciles; the
secret-blocked components are simply not created until hand-offs arrive. The
no-secret tier carries no SOPS content, so it needs no sops-age key. prod is
untouched (still builds the monolith). Convergence path coded in (delete rollout/
+ the two deletes) — R-ENV-02 divergence flagged for architect review.
Component hardening via cluster-vars (prod keeps strict posture):
- KYVERNO_VALIDATION_ACTION Enforce->Audit(dev), _WEBHOOK_FAILURE_POLICY
Fail->Ignore(dev), _ADMISSION_REPLICAS 3->1(dev); webhook namespaceSelector
excludes system+platform namespaces.
- MONITORING_STORAGE_CLASS var; GRAFANA_ADMIN_SECRET var (dev ''=chart default);
Alertmanager SMTP/secret deferred to Phase-4 with verbatim re-enable markers.
Cilium parity verified against the live CNI (no-op adopt). Validated:
kubectl kustomize dev/prod/all-components, envsubst->YAML parse, make -C ci gate PASS.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <[email protected]>
jakman85andClaude Opus 5