jakman85andClaude Opus 5
44983095e1
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]>
7.1 KiB
image-automation — Flux's image-update-automation cannot write back to git
Alert: ImageUpdateAutomationFailing (warning, 30m)
File: platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml, group platform-health.automated-updates
Expression: max by (namespace, name) (gotk_reconcile_condition{kind="ImageUpdateAutomation", type="Ready", status="False"}) == 1
What this means here
ImageUpdateAutomation is the write-back half of hands-off updates (ADR-0009): it commits new image
tags into git so Flux then deploys them. When it is Ready=False, stable image advances silently
stop — nothing breaks, nothing degrades, the platform just quietly stops receiving updates. That is
the R-UPD-02 failure mode this alert exists for.
Read this first: on this cluster, image automation is authored and DELIBERATELY DISABLED. It has
been that way since 2026-08-24, pending (a) a Gitea write credential for the automation to push with
and (b) flux install --components-extra=image-reflector-controller,image-automation-controller. The
line is still commented out in platform/kustomization.yaml. So:
- If this alert fires, the most likely explanation is that the feature was partially enabled —
someone uncommented the component or a rendered app started emitting
ImageRepository/ImagePolicyCRs whose controllers are not installed. - Rendered apps emit those CRs by default;
catalog/render.py --no-image-automationis the documented workaround for exactly this. - There is consequently no real incident history for this alert. Everything below is mechanism, not
post-mortem, and it says so honestly rather than inventing precedent.
This alert is currently INERT.
count(gotk_reconcile_condition)returned 0 series on prod on 2026-09-13 — there is no Flux-controller scrape job among Prometheus's 19 jobs, so everygotk_*rule evaluates against nothing. Read the CRs directly with the commands below, and see/runbooks/targets-downfor 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
Are the controllers even installed?
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n flux-system get deploy | sort; echo; \
kubectl --context k3s-prod api-resources --api-group=image.toolkit.fluxcd.io'
The automation objects and their messages:
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
'kubectl --context k3s-prod get imageupdateautomations.image.toolkit.fluxcd.io -A \
-o custom-columns=NS:.metadata.namespace,NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message,LASTRUN:.status.lastAutomationRunTime'
The controller log — the git error is always in here:
infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n flux-system logs deploy/image-automation-controller --tail=100 2>&1 | tail -40'
Is the repo configured with a write path at all?
grep -rn "image-automation\|ImageUpdateAutomation\|components-extra" platform/kustomization.yaml bootstrap/ clusters/ 2>/dev/null | head -20
Likely causes, most likely first
1. The controllers are not installed (expected state here)
api-resources --api-group=image.toolkit.fluxcd.io returns nothing, or the deployments are absent.
Then the CRs are inert objects and the alert reflects a half-enabled feature. Remediation: either
finish enabling it (an operator runs flux install --components-extra=... — note that Flux's own
controllers were installed imperatively and carry no Flux ownership labels, so nothing under
clusters/** can install a controller or change a controller flag), or stop rendering the CRs with
catalog/render.py --no-image-automation.
2. No git write credential
The automation must push. Prod's source is http://gitea.gitea.svc.cluster.local:3000, and the
read-only source credential is not a write credential. The controller log will say authentication
failed or permission denied. Remediation: a Gitea token in a SOPS-encrypted Secret referenced by the
GitRepository/automation, added in git — and note the standing rule from the OIDC incident:
non-secret environment-specific values must not live inside an encrypted Secret, because
${BASE_DOMAIN} substitution can never reach inside one.
3. It cannot push because the branch moved
Automation commits to a branch; a force-push or a protected branch rejects it. The log names the ref.
4. The commit is being made but the Kustomization is not picking it up
Then this is not the right runbook — go to /runbooks/flux-reconcile.
When to escalate or stop
- This is a warning with a 30m
forfor a reason: nothing is broken. Do not treat it as an outage. The consequence is "no new image versions", which is measured in days. - Do not create a Gitea write credential ad hoc. It is a new secret in the DR path and belongs to the operator, SOPS-encrypted, in git.
- Do not enable the extra Flux controllers to make the alert stop. Enabling automation on a
cluster that has never run it will start proposing image bumps across every workload at once; that is
a planned change, with
/runbooks/update-rollbackas its companion. - If the alert is firing because the feature is half-enabled, the honest fix is to finish or to revert — both are git changes and both want the operator's decision.
Source of truth: runbooks/image-automation.md. Index: /runbooks/
Records: DECISIONS-LOG.md (image automation authored-and-disabled since 2026-08-24; the Flux
controllers are outside Flux's own inventory).