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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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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 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

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.

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).

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