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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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image-policy-stalled — An ImagePolicy or ImageRepository cannot resolve its tag

Alert: ImagePolicyStalled (warning, 1h) File: platform/monitoring/alerts.yaml, group platform-health.automated-updates Expression: max by (namespace, name, kind) (gotk_reconcile_condition{kind=~"ImagePolicy|ImageRepository", type="Ready", status="False"}) == 1

What this means here

An ImageRepository cannot scan a registry, or an ImagePolicy cannot pick a tag out of what was scanned. The effect is narrower than /runbooks/image-automation: automation itself is healthy, but this one service stops receiving updates (R-UPD-01), while everything else continues. It is therefore easy to miss, which is what the 1h for and the per-object labels are for.

The same framing applies as for image-automation: this feature is authored and deliberately disabled on this cluster and has been since 2026-08-24 (no Gitea write credential, and the image-reflector-controller / image-automation-controller components are not installed — the line is still commented out in platform/kustomization.yaml). Rendered apps emit ImageRepository and ImagePolicy CRs anyway, so the objects can exist with no controller to reconcile them; catalog/render.py --no-image-automation is the documented workaround. There is no incident history for this alert — the section below is mechanism, honestly labelled.

One live constraint worth knowing while reading registry errors: the images in this platform come from docker.io, ghcr.io, lscr.io, quay.io, registry.k8s.io and registry.gitlab.com. Docker Hub's anonymous rate limit is the most likely real-world cause of a scan failure once automation is switched on. 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 every gotk_* rule evaluates against nothing. Read the CRs directly with the commands below, and 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

Which object, and the message (the message is nearly always the whole answer):

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get imagerepositories.image.toolkit.fluxcd.io -A \
     -o custom-columns=NS:.metadata.namespace,NAME:.metadata.name,IMAGE:.spec.image,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message,TAGS:.status.lastScanResult.tagCount; echo; \
   kubectl --context k3s-prod get imagepolicies.image.toolkit.fluxcd.io -A \
     -o custom-columns=NS:.metadata.namespace,NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].status,LATEST:.status.latestImage,MSG:.status.conditions[?\(@.type==\"Ready\"\)].message'

Are the controllers installed at all?

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n flux-system get deploy | grep -i image || echo "image controllers NOT installed (expected on this cluster)"'

The reflector's log:

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n flux-system logs deploy/image-reflector-controller --tail=80 2>&1 | tail -30'

Can the cluster reach the registry at all? (Default-deny is the baseline; a new namespace may simply not be allowed out.)

infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod get pods -A --field-selector status.phase!=Running | head; echo; \
   kubectl --context k3s-prod get events -A --field-selector reason=Failed --sort-by=.lastTimestamp | grep -i "pull\|registry" | tail -10'

Likely causes, most likely first

1. The image controllers are not installed (expected state here)

The CRs exist because catalog/render.py emits them; nothing reconciles them. Remediation: render with --no-image-automation, or have the operator finish enabling automation. Note that the Flux controllers were installed imperatively and are outside Flux's own inventory, so no git change can install them.

2. Registry rate limit

Docker Hub anonymous pulls/scans are limited per IP, and all three nodes share one WAN address. The message says toomanyrequests. Remediation: a registry credential (SOPS-encrypted, in git), or scan less often via spec.interval.

3. Registry auth

A private repository with no secretRef, or an expired token. The message names it.

4. The policy's range matches nothing

ImagePolicy semver ranges come from each ServiceDefinition's update.range (for example ">=2024.0.0" for pihole, ">=24.0.0" for keycloak). A range that no published tag satisfies — or a repository that publishes only latest (this platform has lscr.io/linuxserver/jackett:latest and plexinc/pms-docker:latest) — leaves the policy with nothing to select. Remediation: fix the range in catalog/<service>.yaml and re-render; a latest-only image cannot participate in automation at all and should not carry a policy.

5. Egress is blocked for that namespace

Default-deny everywhere (R-NET-01) means outbound registry access is an explicit allow. Cross-read /runbooks/denied-flows, and in particular the post-Cilium-upgrade finding that toEntities: world no longer covers a call whose destination resolves to an in-cluster backend.

When to escalate or stop

Warning, 1h, single service: this does not page. The consequence is one workload pinned at its current version.
Do not widen an update.range to make the alert clear. The range is the service's update policy (R-UPD-01); loosening it to satisfy a scanner is how an unintended major version arrives.
Do not add registry credentials ad hoc — new secret, DR path, operator's call.
If the same object has been stalled for days, the honest outcome is to remove its automation CRs (--no-image-automation) rather than leave a permanently-failing object training everyone to ignore the alert. Alert fatigue is a recorded, expensive failure mode on this cluster.

Source of truth: runbooks/image-policy-stalled.md. Index: /runbooks/ Records: DECISIONS-LOG.md (image automation authored-and-disabled; --no-image-automation); catalog/*.yaml (update.channel / update.range per service).

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