Files
home-network-k3s-impl/platform/monitoring
jakman85 52398d4426
gate / gate (push) Has been cancelled
gate / conformance (push) Has been cancelled
merge: Longhorn alerting measured the wrong things, three ways
(1) LonghornVolumeCapacityHigh alarmed on ALLOCATION while calling itself a
capacity alarm. Prometheus's TSDB volume read 0.973 while the kubelet saw the
same filesystem at 0.208, because 37.73 GiB of it is a Longhorn SYSTEM
snapshot — the kind taken for the full replica rebuild that prod-1's drive
replacement forced — growing +152 MB/h while the filesystem stayed flat. The
rule was therefore unclearable by design, i.e. permanently firing. Deleted as
redundant, shown rather than asserted: 23 of 24 volumes fall under the
kubelet-based filling rules, and the 24th is volumeMode Block, which the
deleted rule was not covering either.

(2) LonghornVolumeDegraded and LonghornVolumeFaulted could not fire even with
the scrape working. longhorn_volume_robustness on 1.12.1 is ONE-HOT over a
state label with values 0/1, not the 0-3 enum the rules and their comment
assumed, so a faulted volume would have alerted nobody. This survived the
scrape fix landing hours earlier.

(3) LonghornNodeStorageHigh was wrong twice: its 0.85 threshold sat above the
75% at which storage-minimal-available-percentage=25 already removes a disk
from the scheduling pool, and longhorn_node_storage_usage_bytes SUMS a node's
disks, so one full disk hid behind a half-empty sibling. Replaced with
per-disk LonghornDiskAllocationHigh (>0.70) and LonghornDiskUnschedulable,
the latter reading Longhorn's own verdict instead of re-deriving a formula
from three settings no metric exports.

Baseline green with 11/11 mutations red. retentionSize 45GiB of 50Gi and
discard/TRIM are both REPORTED with recommendations, not changed: TRIM would
not have helped here, since remove-snapshots-during-filesystem-trim is false
and the 37.7 GiB is a snapshot.

# Conflicts:
#	DECISIONS-LOG.md
2026-09-13 17:23:37 -05:00
..
2026-08-24 19:52:25 -05:00

platform/monitoring

Observability stack — kube-prometheus-stack (Prometheus + Alertmanager + Grafana) + Loki + Grafana Alloy + platform-health PrometheusRules.

Contents

File What
namespace.yaml monitoring namespace
helmrepositories.yaml prometheus-community + grafana Flux HelmRepositorys
kube-prometheus-stack.yaml HelmRelease — Prometheus, Alertmanager (→ SMTP email), Grafana, kube-state-metrics, node-exporter
loki.yaml HelmRelease — Loki single-binary, filesystem, compactor-enforced retention
alloy.yaml HelmRelease — Grafana Alloy DaemonSet, tails pod logs → Loki
alerts.yaml Platform-health PrometheusRules (R-OBS-04)
tests/ promtool test rules unit tests over the committed PrometheusRules — each rule pinned quiet on the good state and firing on the bad one (tests/run.sh — the repo-wide harness, it also runs other components' companion *.promtool-test.yaml; enforced by the L0 check alert-rules-unit-tested)
kustomization.yaml builds all of the above

Requirement mapping

  • R-OBS-01 (what is monitored): Prometheus + node-exporter + kube-state-metrics for metrics; Alloy → Loki for logs. serviceMonitorSelectorNilUsesHelmValues: false so ServiceMonitors from every namespace (and those rendered from ServiceDefinitions, docs/13) are scraped by default.
  • R-OBS-02 (alert delivery): Alertmanager routes by severity (critical vs warning) to email. SMTP creds are a SOPS secret referenced by name only (see below).
  • R-OBS-03 (dashboards): Grafana, with the dashboard/datasource sidecar watching grafana_dashboard-labeled ConfigMaps across all namespaces (per-service dashboards land here). Grafana is part of the C2 UI composition (docs/12), later behind Keycloak SSO (ADR-0014).
  • R-OBS-04 (platform health): alerts.yaml — first-class alerts for nodes, Longhorn, Flux, cert-manager, networking/VPN/Hubble, Velero backups, Keycloak/IdP, and the monitor's own capacity. Split critical/warning per the docs/10 severity model.

SMTP secret (operator hand-off)

Alertmanager reads the SMTP password from a mounted SOPS-encrypted Secret — referenced by name, never inlined. The operator must provide (out of band, SOPS-encrypted per docs/07):

kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: alertmanager-smtp        # <-- referenced in kube-prometheus-stack.yaml (alertmanagerSpec.secrets)
  namespace: monitoring
stringData:
  smtp-password: "<app password>"   # mounted at /etc/alertmanager/secrets/alertmanager-smtp/smtp-password

The non-secret SMTP fields (smtp_smarthost, smtp_from, smtp_auth_username, and the receiver to: address) are REPLACE-ME placeholders in kube-prometheus-stack.yaml for the operator to fill (same convention as velero/). Grafana's admin bootstrap likewise references a SOPS secret by name — grafana-admin-credentials (keys admin-user / admin-password).

Dev trims (the ~22 GiB RAM ceiling)

This subtree is authored to stay light on the single dev workstation:

  • Loki chunksCache/resultsCache DISABLED — the grafana/loki chart's default memcached caches request ~8-9 GiB each; leaving them on would blow the budget by itself. Also disabled: the nginx gateway, lokiCanary, and test hooks. Loki runs SingleBinary (one pod).
  • Single replicas everywhere (Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, Loki).
  • Modest requests/limits on every component (see values). Ephemeral (emptyDir) state for Alertmanager and Grafana in dev.
  • k3s control-plane scrape jobs disabled (kubeControllerManager/kubeScheduler/kubeEtcd/ kubeProxy) — embedded in k3s, not separately scrapable; keeps targets green and RAM down.

Approximate steady-state memory requests (what the scheduler reserves):

Component Req Notes
Prometheus 384Mi limit 1Gi
Alertmanager 32Mi
Grafana 128Mi
prometheus-operator 96Mi
kube-state-metrics 64Mi
node-exporter ×3 96Mi 32Mi/node DaemonSet
Loki (single binary) 192Mi limit 512Mi
Alloy ×3 288Mi 96Mi/node DaemonSet
Total requests ~1.3 GiB working set typically ~1.5-2.5 GiB; limit ceiling ~3 GiB

Comfortably within the 22 GiB box alongside the rest of the platform.

Environment knobs (R-ENV-02)

Only three substitution vars touch this subtree; the dev overlay (clusters/dev) patches cluster-vars to dev values:

Var base dev
${MONITORING_PROMETHEUS_RETENTION} 7d 3d
${MONITORING_PROMETHEUS_PVC_SIZE} 10Gi 8Gi
${MONITORING_PROMETHEUS_RETENTION_SIZE} 8GiB 5GiB
${MONITORING_LOKI_PVC_SIZE} 10Gi 5Gi

MONITORING_PROMETHEUS_RETENTION_SIZE is a size-based retention cap (Prometheus *iB units, distinct from the K8s Gi PVC knob) and must stay below MONITORING_PROMETHEUS_PVC_SIZE. Time-only retention prunes nothing until the age window elapses, so a young/busy cluster fills /prometheus first; a full disk wedges every WAL commit (scrapes still 200 but samples are dropped, the head freezes) and makes every absent()/==0 platform alert fire falsely. The size cap drops the oldest blocks before the disk fills. (prod overlay: PVC 50Gi, cap 45GiB.)

PVCs use the replicated longhorn StorageClass (ADR-0003).

Notes / known gaps for bring-up

  • Loki log retention has no dedicated knob. Only the three vars above exist. Loki's retention_period is hardcoded to 72h (compactor-enforced) to mirror dev metrics retention. Promote to a cluster-vars knob (in clusters/, out of this subtree) if per-env log retention is wanted.
  • Several R-OBS-04 rules depend on exporters/ServiceMonitors owned by other workstreams (Flux, cert-manager, Longhorn, Velero, Keycloak, Cilium/Hubble). Rules are authored to fire once those series arrive; metric names marked TODO(WS-*) in alerts.yaml (notably the egress VPN metric) need confirming against the deployed exporter.
  • Hubble network-flow visibility itself is delivered by platform/cilium (docs/03); this subtree only consumes its metrics for denied-flow alerts.

Validate (no deploy)

kubectl kustomize platform/monitoring

Author-only — nothing here is applied to a cluster; Flux reconciles it at deploy time.