home-network-k3s-impl/runbooks/flux-suspended.md

flux-suspended — A Flux resource has been suspended for an hour

Alert: FluxResourceSuspended (warning, 1h) File: platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml, group platform-health.flux Expression: max by (namespace, name, kind) (gotk_suspend_status) == 1

What this means here

Someone turned reconciliation off for a resource and it is still off an hour later. While suspended, Flux neither applies new commits nor corrects drift — git stops being the truth for that subtree, silently, and everything downstream of a suspended gating tier is frozen with it.

Suspension is a legitimate emergency valve here and is used deliberately: cilium was split into its own Kustomization partly so that flux suspend kustomization cilium becomes an option that does not freeze the other eleven platform components. The problem is never the suspend; it is the forgotten suspend. Two real cases:

• After the 2026-09-04 external-dns incident, prod's whole platform tier and everything downstream were suspended and left suspended (infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md §10). That suspension is also the only reason a second bug never fired: platform-config would otherwise have requested a *.home.keithjackson.dev wildcard from letsencrypt-prod for a certificate dev already held, and the two clusters would have raced each other's _acme-challenge TXT records on one zone — neither would reliably solve DNS-01.
• Velero was found suspended live, with the suspension never recorded in git, and resumed with flux resume. A backup controller that is not reconciling is the definition of a silent DR gap.

The 1h for is the point: short suspensions during maintenance are expected and should not notify. This alert is currently INERT. count(gotk_reconcile_condition) and count(gotk_suspend_status) both returned 0 series on prod on 2026-09-13: there is no scrape job for the Flux controllers in Prometheus's 19 jobs, so every gotk_*-based rule (FluxReconciliationFailure, FluxResourceSuspended, ImageUpdateAutomationFailing, ImagePolicyStalled, UpdateHealthGateFailed) evaluates against nothing. Flux health is therefore unmonitored today and must be read from the CRs directly, with the commands below. See /runbooks/targets-down for the full list of inert rule groups. Adding the Flux controllers' ServiceMonitor is open work.

Running the commands in this runbook

kubectl does not work on the operator workstation. The toolchain lives only in the pinned dev container, and the host's k3s-oidc context hangs on a browser prompt once its token expires — that hang is not the cluster being down. Every command below runs as:

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c 'kubectl --context k3s-prod get nodes'

Always pass --context k3s-prod explicitly. dev.sh merges BOTH clusters into one kubeconfig and picks a current-context per invocation, and that default has already changed once — it was k3s-dev until dev was decommissioned on 2026-09-13, and is k3s-prod now. A command that names its context means the same thing next month as it does today; one that relies on the default does not, and the failure is silent (it answers confidently about the other cluster). CLUSTER=prod infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run kubectl ... selects it explicitly, and every invocation prints a banner naming the cluster it is about to talk to — read it. Do not run two dev.sh invocations at once; they share one container and interfere.

USE FULLY-QUALIFIED RESOURCE NAMES, ALWAYS. Three CRDs on this cluster register the kind Backup: longhorn.io/v1beta2, postgresql.cnpg.io/v1 and velero.io/v1. The bare short name resolves to Longhorn's, which holds zero objects — so kubectl get backup -A prints "No resources found" on a cluster holding 6 Velero backups and 27 CNPG backups. Verified on prod 2026-09-13. Reading that as "the backups are gone" and acting on it turns a false negative into real data loss. Write backups.velero.io, backups.postgresql.cnpg.io, clusters.postgresql.cnpg.io, settings.longhorn.io, volumes.longhorn.io, nodes.longhorn.io.

Mutating kubectl (apply, patch, annotate, rollout) and flux reconcile are blocked for agents here: every durable change goes through git. main is a protected branch — a direct push is rejected. A change lands by pushing a branch, opening a PR, and merging it once the gate is green; that merge is the deploy. Where this runbook gives a mutating command it is for an operator, and it says so.

First commands

What is suspended, across every Flux kind:

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'for k in kustomizations.kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io helmreleases.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io \
            gitrepositories.source.toolkit.fluxcd.io helmrepositories.source.toolkit.fluxcd.io \
            imagerepositories.image.toolkit.fluxcd.io imagepolicies.image.toolkit.fluxcd.io \
            imageupdateautomations.image.toolkit.fluxcd.io; do \
     echo "== $k"; kubectl --context k3s-prod get "$k" -A -o custom-columns=NS:.metadata.namespace,NAME:.metadata.name,SUSPENDED:.spec.suspend 2>/dev/null | grep -v "<none>"; done'

Is the suspension declared in git, or is it live-only drift? (This is the important question.)

grep -rn "suspend" clusters/ platform/ | grep -v "^Binary"

If it is not in git, it was applied by hand and nothing will restore it after a controller restart — which means the resource may un-suspend itself at an unpredictable moment, or stay off forever.

How far behind is it?

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get kustomizations.kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io -A \
     -o custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name,SUSPENDED:.spec.suspend,APPLIED:.status.lastAppliedRevision; echo; \
   kubectl --context k3s-prod -n flux-system get gitrepositories.source.toolkit.fluxcd.io \
     -o jsonpath="{.items[0].status.artifact.revision}{\"\n\"}"'

Likely causes, most likely first

1. A maintenance suspension nobody resumed

By far the most common, and the Velero case above is the archetype. Remediation (operator): flux resume kustomization <name> — but only after reading the next paragraph.

2. It is suspended for a reason that still applies

Before resuming, find out what would be applied. A tier suspended during an incident may be holding back a change that caused the incident. The 2026-09-04 case is the cautionary one: resuming platform-config while a second cluster still held the same wildcard certificate would have started an ACME DNS-01 race on a shared Cloudflare zone. Diff first: compare status.lastAppliedRevision against the GitRepository's current revision and read the commits in between.

3. A crashlooping leaf was suspended instead of being moved

The correct fix for "a leaf UI keeps failing and stalls the tier" is a wait: false tier of its own — that is what happened to oauth2-proxy, headlamp, homepage, crafty, velero and runbooks. Suspension as a permanent substitute leaves drift correction off for that component forever.

4. Image automation

ImageUpdateAutomation/ImagePolicy/ImageRepository are authored and deliberately disabled here (pending a Gitea write credential and flux install --components-extra), so if those show up, this is expected state, not an incident. See /runbooks/image-automation.

When to escalate or stop

• Do not resume a gating tier (cilium, platform, platform-config) without the operator. Resuming applies every commit since the suspension in one pass, to the tier everything depends on.
• Do resume velero promptly if it is the suspended resource — a suspended backup controller is a DR gap, and it has happened before.
• If the suspension is not in git, record it in git (or resume it). A live-only suspension is undocumented state, which is the failure class this repo keeps finding.
• If you cannot determine why something was suspended, stop and ask. That is a safer outcome than either resuming blind or leaving it off.

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Source of truth: runbooks/flux-suspended.md. Index: /runbooks/ Records: infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md §10 (the 2026-09-04 suspension and the queued ACME race); DECISIONS-LOG.md (Velero found suspended with the suspension never in git).