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jakman85andClaude Opus 5 44983095e1 feat(runbooks): make the 42 alert runbook_url annotations resolve

Every platform-health alert rule carries
`runbook_url: "https://${BASE_DOMAIN}/runbooks/<name>"` — 42 annotations over 34
distinct names, across platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml,
platform/monitoring/pvc-capacity-alerts.yaml, platform/cnpg/alerts.yaml and
platform/kubevirt/alerts.yaml. There was no runbooks/ directory and no HTTPRoute
serving that path: an in-cluster probe of
https://home.keithjackson.dev/runbooks/node-down returned HTTP 404. Every alert that
reached a human handed them a dead link at the exact moment the documentation is read,
and the annotation made it look solved — the same green-surface-over-absent-mechanism
class as the import Job that reported success while storing placeholder secrets.

No alerts.yaml is touched and no runbook_url value changes. The existing URL scheme is
made to resolve instead.

WHAT LANDS
- runbooks/<34>.md — one per name, each grounded in this cluster's real topology and,
  where one exists, its real incident history: the 2026-09-07 k3s-prod-1 etcd I/O
  starvation (measured PSI 11.36 vs 0.75/1.29, the exact journal lines, the four
  mechanisms proven inert), the Longhorn reboot tax and the freeze/thaw of
  concurrent-replica-rebuild-per-node-limit, Cilium's once-resolved egress interface
  cache (Ifindex 3 against a live 1780) and the absence of OSS failover, the CNPG
  38-hour ContinuousArchiving=False with its measured 6.8 MiB/h disk-full clock and the
  2026-09-12 aggregation-scope fix, the 2026-09-06 Keycloak lockout in which all 12
  clients held literal placeholder secrets behind an entirely green cluster, the Velero
  R2 x-amz-tagging NotImplemented incompatibility and its v1.14.3-rc.2 pin, and swap
  re-enabling itself across reboots via systemd-gpt-auto-generator.
  Each page states what the alert means HERE, the first diagnostic commands, likely
  causes ordered by probability with a remediation each, and when to escalate or stop.
- Every page uses FULLY-QUALIFIED resource names and says why: three CRDs register the
  kind `Backup` here, the bare short name resolves to Longhorn's (zero objects), so
  `kubectl get backup -A` prints "No resources found" on a cluster holding 6 Velero and
  27 CNPG backups. Acting on that false negative is how a CLI quirk becomes data loss.
- Every page states that kubectl only works via
  `infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c '...'` with an explicit `--context k3s-prod`,
  because dev.sh defaults its current-context to k3s-dev.
- Pages also record which alert groups are INERT today (measured 2026-09-13: no
  Longhorn, cert-manager, Flux-controller or Hubble scrape job exists, so 13 rules
  evaluate against nothing) so nobody reads their silence as health.

SERVING — runbooks/serving/ plus clusters/base/runbooks.yaml
A two-replica nginx-unprivileged serving a ConfigMap generated from runbooks/*.md, at
the apex `/runbooks` prefix, in its own non-gating post-platform Flux tier
(dependsOn platform-config, wait:false) — the platform/homepage pattern, file for file.
- The service catalog cannot express this route: ingressRoutes[].host is pattern-bound
  to a single DNS label plus the apex, so the bare apex is unrepresentable, and there is
  no path field.
- Rejected: redirecting to the Gitea web UI. A runbook is read when the platform is
  broken, and Gitea is an app-tier workload whose own dependencies several of these
  runbooks document; Gateway API's RequestRedirect also has no "append .md" modifier,
  so it would need 34 hand-maintained ReplaceFullPath rules.
- configMapGenerator maps each file to an EXTENSIONLESS key (node-down=node-down.md),
  so /runbooks/node-down is a plain static lookup with no rewrite rule. Served as
  text/plain: the namespace has DNS-only egress, so a CDN markdown renderer could not
  load anyway.
- The tier declares NO postBuild.substituteFrom, deliberately: envsubst would run over
  the prose and silently empty every ${...} shell example (it fails open — the 2026-09-01
  emptied Cilium k8sServiceHost). The HTTPRoute omits `hostnames:` and inherits the
  https-apex listener's, so nothing needs substituting.

AUTH — PUBLIC, deliberately
auth-mode=none. Gating these pages behind oauth2-proxy/Keycloak would make
runbooks/keycloak-down unreadable when Keycloak is down and
runbooks/keycloak-client-secrets unreadable during the exact 2026-09-06 failure mode.
An operator who cannot log in is this route's primary reader. Content is operational
procedure only, no secrets. The rationale is recorded in an annotation on the HTTPRoute
so the route is left OUT of the Gateway ext-authz attachment when forward-auth
enforcement lands.

PROVEN — in-cluster probe through the Gateway on prod
  /runbooks/node-down        HTTP 200   8613 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/keycloak-down    HTTP 200   9378 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/cnpg-archiving   HTTP 200  11729 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/longhorn-faulted HTTP 200   9135 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/vpn-down         HTTP 200  11092 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
  /runbooks/backup-failure   HTTP 200   9604 bytes  text/plain; charset=utf-8
HTTPRoute Accepted by io.cilium/gateway-controller on sectionName https-apex; the
`/runbooks` prefix wins over homepage's apex `/` by Gateway API longest-path precedence.

GUARD — conformance/tests/l0-static/alert-runbooks-resolvable (R-OBS-04)
363 offline assertions. It checks BOTH halves, because the regression is silent in both
directions: an alert with a new runbook_url and no runbook links to a 404, AND a runbook
committed without its configMapGenerator entry is in git, reviewed, merged, and still
404s in the cluster. Also asserts a quality floor so a stub cannot make the link look
fixed, and that route/listener/nginx prefix agree with the annotations.
Proven to fail, then reverted: a bogus runbook_url (2 FAIL), a runbook removed from the
generator (1 FAIL), and a 31-byte stub (7 FAIL).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>

2026-09-12 23:49:58 -05:00

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cert-expiry — A certificate is expiring soon, or imminently

Alerts: CertificateExpiringSoon (warning, <14d, 1h) and CertificateExpiryImminent (critical, <3d, 1h) File: platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml, group platform-health.certificates Expression: (certmanager_certificate_expiration_timestamp_seconds - time()) < (14 * 24 * 3600) / (3 * 24 * 3600)

What this means here

cert-manager has a Certificate whose expiry is inside 14 days (warning) or 3 days (critical) and it has not renewed. cert-manager normally renews at two-thirds of lifetime — about 60 days into a 90-day Let's Encrypt certificate — so by the time this fires, renewal has already been failing for weeks. Treat it as a late symptom of /runbooks/cert-issuance, not as a separate problem: the fix is almost always "why is issuance failing", and expiry is the clock running out on that.

What is at stake concretely. There is effectively one certificate that matters: wildcard-home in the gateway namespace, secret wildcard-home-tls, requesting both *.${BASE_DOMAIN} and ${BASE_DOMAIN} from ${ACME_CLUSTER_ISSUER} (= letsencrypt-prod on prod). Every HTTPS listener on the shared Gateway terminates with it — the wildcard https listener and the https-apex listener both reference wildcard-home-tls. If it expires:

every public hostname serves an untrusted certificate;
SSO breaks in-cluster, because OIDC clients validate the issuer's TLS. This is not hypothetical: while the wildcard was still LE-staging, in-cluster clients rejected it with x509: certificate signed by unknown authority, which is what forced the move to letsencrypt-prod;
and the page you are reading right now is served over that same certificate.

There is no history of an actual expiry on this cluster. The recorded history is all issuance failures. Say so rather than inventing precedent — but note the corollary: the renewal path has never been exercised under stress, so do not assume it will quietly work.

Verify the alert can even fire (measured 2026-09-13)

This alert is currently INERT. count(certmanager_clock_time_seconds) and count(certmanager_certificate_expiration_timestamp_seconds) both returned 0 series on prod: there is no cert-manager scrape job among Prometheus's 19 jobs, so all three certificate rules evaluate against nothing. Certificate expiry is unmonitored today. Check expiry by hand with the commands below, and see /runbooks/targets-down for the full list of inert rule groups. Adding cert-manager's 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 defaults its current-context to k3s-dev, so a command without --context silently answers about the wrong cluster. (CLUSTER=prod infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run kubectl ... is equivalent.) 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 (git push origin main is the deploy). Where this runbook gives a mutating command it is for an operator, and it says so.

First commands

Every certificate and its real expiry, straight from the CRs (works with no metrics):

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get certificates.cert-manager.io -A \
     -o custom-columns=NS:.metadata.namespace,NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,NOTAFTER:.status.notAfter,RENEWAL:.status.renewalTime,ISSUER:.spec.issuerRef.name'

What the Gateway is actually serving (the answer that matters), read from outside the cluster with an explicit SNI — testing HTTPS from inside a pod is misleading here, and an IP+SNI probe without the right SNI returns curl exit 35:

curl -sv --resolve home.keithjackson.dev:443:192.168.2.20 https://home.keithjackson.dev/runbooks/ 2>&1 | grep -E "expire|subject|issuer|SSL certificate"

echo | openssl s_client -connect 192.168.2.20:443 -servername grafana.home.keithjackson.dev 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -subject -issuer -dates

Is a renewal in flight or stuck?

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get certificaterequests.cert-manager.io,orders.acme.cert-manager.io,challenges.acme.cert-manager.io -A; echo; \
   kubectl --context k3s-prod -n cert-manager logs deploy/cert-manager --tail=80 | tail -40'

Likely causes, most likely first

1. Issuance has been failing since the last successful renewal

The dominant cause, and the one with real history. Go to /runbooks/cert-issuance — it covers the DNS-01 self-check failure (fixed with dns01RecursiveNameservers: "1.1.1.1:53,8.8.8.8:53" and dns01RecursiveNameserversOnly: true), the Cloudflare token, and the ACME order/challenge chain. Fixing issuance fixes expiry; nothing else does.

2. Two clusters racing the same `_acme-challenge` TXT record

A specific, recorded hazard for any future two-cluster window. infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md §10 records that after the 2026-09-04 incident, platform-config would have requested a *.home.keithjackson.dev wildcard from letsencrypt-prod for a certificate dev already held; both clusters would then have raced each other's _acme-challenge TXT records on one Cloudflare zone and neither would reliably solve DNS-01. It never fired only because the tier was suspended. If a second cluster exists, confirm which one owns the zone before renewing.

3. Let's Encrypt rate limits

One wildcard is well inside the limits, so this is unlikely — unless something has been retrying in a loop. cert-manager logs will say too many certificates already issued. Remediation: stop the loop, wait out the window; do not switch to letsencrypt-staging as a workaround, because in-cluster OIDC clients reject the staging chain (that is the bug that forced LE-prod).

4. The issuer or its credential changed

${ACME_CLUSTER_ISSUER} is a cluster-vars knob; the Cloudflare API token is a SOPS-encrypted Secret. Note the standing rule: non-secret, environment-specific values must not live inside an encrypted Secret — ${BASE_DOMAIN} substitution can never reach inside one, which is exactly how prod's OIDC clients once ended up pointed at dev's Keycloak.

5. The Certificate is Ready but the Secret is stale

Check the Secret's actual notAfter (the openssl command above) rather than the CR's status. The Gateway reads the Secret.

When to escalate or stop

CertificateExpiryImminent on wildcard-home is a cluster-wide outage in under 3 days, including SSO and including this runbook server. Get the operator immediately.
Do not switch to letsencrypt-staging to make issuance succeed. It will issue, and it will break every in-cluster OIDC client with x509: unknown authority.
Do not delete the wildcard-home-tls Secret to force a reissue while issuance is broken — you would replace a certificate that still has days left with none at all.
Do not hand-edit the Secret. cert-manager owns it; the durable change is in git.
Verify DNS at the authority (dig @betty.ns.cloudflare.com _acme-challenge.home.keithjackson.dev TXT), never at a resolver: 1.1.1.1 has served a deleted TXT record for minutes here and produced a false failure diagnosis.

Source of truth: runbooks/cert-expiry.md. Index: /runbooks/ Records: DECISIONS-LOG.md "Fix 5 — cert-manager DNS-01 self-check via public resolvers" and the LE-staging → LE-prod switch (Session 7); infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md §10 (the queued ACME race).

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