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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

8.7 KiB

Raw Blame History

cert-issuance — A Certificate is not Ready (ACME issuance is failing)

Alert: CertificateNotReady (warning, 1h) File: platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml, group platform-health.certificates Expression: certmanager_certificate_ready_status{condition="False"} == 1

What this means here

cert-manager cannot issue or renew a certificate. The one that matters is 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, so issuance failing is a slow-burning cluster-wide outage: it does nothing today and takes down every hostname plus in-cluster SSO when the existing certificate expires. The 1h for reflects that — a failing order is worth investigating today, not paging at 3am.

The solver is DNS-01 against Cloudflare, which matters because DNS-01 has a failure mode this cluster has already hit:

The self-check, not the challenge, is the usual failure. On 2026-08-16 the wildcard stalled with the challenge at Presented=true — the Cloudflare TXT record was created, so the API token worked — while cert-manager's propagation self-check looped "DNS record not yet propagated". The record was publicly resolvable at 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8; the NAT'd cluster's own DNS could not see it, because split-horizon CoreDNS answers authoritatively for the zone and never forwards. The fix is live in platform/cert-manager/helmrelease.yaml:

dns01RecursiveNameservers: "1.1.1.1:53,8.8.8.8:53"
dns01RecursiveNameserversOnly: true

The challenge went pending → valid and the certificate Issued. If you find those two lines missing or changed, that is your answer.

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

This alert is currently INERT. count(certmanager_clock_time_seconds) 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 health must be read from the CRs, as below. See /runbooks/targets-down for the full list of inert rule groups.

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

Walk the chain top-down — Certificate → CertificateRequest → Order → Challenge. The failure is almost always visible at one specific level:

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,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message,NOTAFTER:.status.notAfter'

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get certificaterequests.cert-manager.io -A; echo ==; \
   kubectl --context k3s-prod get orders.acme.cert-manager.io -A; echo ==; \
   kubectl --context k3s-prod get challenges.acme.cert-manager.io -A -o wide'

The controller log, which carries the actual ACME error text:

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n cert-manager logs deploy/cert-manager --tail=150 2>&1 | grep -iE "error|propagat|challenge|order|rate" | tail -30'

Is the TXT record really there? Ask the authority, never a resolver — 1.1.1.1 has served a deleted TXT record here for minutes and produced a false failure diagnosis:

dig +short @betty.ns.cloudflare.com _acme-challenge.home.keithjackson.dev TXT
dig +short @1.1.1.1 _acme-challenge.home.keithjackson.dev TXT

Is the resolver override still configured?

grep -n "dns01Recursive" platform/cert-manager/helmrelease.yaml

The issuer and its credential:

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get clusterissuers.cert-manager.io \
     -o custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message'

Likely causes, most likely first

1. The DNS-01 propagation self-check cannot resolve the TXT record

The recorded failure. Signature: Challenge Presented=true, status looping on "DNS record not yet propagated", and dig @betty.ns.cloudflare.com does return the TXT. Cause: cert-manager is asking the cluster's own resolver, which is split-horizon CoreDNS answering authoritatively for the zone and never forwarding. Remediation: the two dns01Recursive* values above, in git.

2. The Cloudflare API token is wrong, expired, or scoped too narrowly

Signature: Challenge never reaches Presented=true, and the log carries a Cloudflare 403/6003. The token lives in a SOPS-encrypted Secret. Note the standing rule from the OIDC incident: non-secret environment-specific values must never live inside an encrypted Secret — ${BASE_DOMAIN} substitution cannot reach inside one, and that is precisely how prod's OIDC clients once ended up pointed at dev's Keycloak. Keep hostnames out; keep only the token in.

3. `EXTERNALDNS_DOMAIN_FILTER` / zone confusion

Recorded as finding F-DNS1: the filter must be the ZONE (keithjackson.dev), not the subdomain. A zone mismatch means the TXT record is created in the wrong place or not at all.

4. Two clusters racing the same `_acme-challenge` record

infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md §10: 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. Only the tier being suspended prevented it. If any second cluster exists, establish which one owns the zone first.

5. Let's Encrypt rate limit

too many certificates already issued in the log. One wildcard is well inside the limits, so this means something has been retrying in a loop. Stop the loop and wait out the window.

6. A new Certificate for a hostname that does not resolve

A newly added service whose DNS is not yet published cannot solve DNS-01. Check ExternalDNS first.

When to escalate or stop

Escalate if wildcard-home has been not-Ready for more than a day, and check /runbooks/cert-expiry for how much runway the existing certificate has. Under 3 days of runway is an operator page.
Never switch ${ACME_CLUSTER_ISSUER} to letsencrypt-staging to get a green certificate. Staging issues fine and then breaks every in-cluster OIDC client with x509: certificate signed by unknown authority — that is the bug that forced LE-prod in the first place.
Do not delete the existing wildcard-home-tls Secret while issuance is broken. A stale but valid certificate is far better than none.
Do not create certificates by hand. cert-manager owns them; the durable change is in git.
Rotating the Cloudflare token is an operator action (SOPS, DR path).

Source of truth: runbooks/cert-issuance.md. Index: /runbooks/ Records: DECISIONS-LOG.md "Fix 5 — cert-manager DNS-01 self-check via public resolvers" (commit ~59dd3d9) and the LE-staging → LE-prod switch; infra/PROD-PROVISIONING.md §10.

8.7 KiB Raw Blame History