Incident Library
  • Root cause
  • Component
  • Symptom
  • Contributing factor
  • Case

Cases3 cases

1 to 3 of 3

  1. IL-0380 A compaction change in InfluxDB Cloud us-east-1 dropped data from compacted files, and queries missed data for weeks
    InfluxData2026
    Symptoms

    From 9 February 2026, InfluxDB Cloud customers on the AWS us-east-1 cluster prod101-us-east-1 found that some recent data did not show up in query responses. The first support ticket about data availability came in on 9 February, the day a compaction change was deployed, and more tickets followed on 10 February.

    Data lossResponse quality degradationHigh latency
    Trigger

    On 9 February 2026 InfluxData deployed to prod101-us-east-1 a compaction change that runs several compaction jobs in parallel on one partition, each on a subset of the data chosen by org id prefix.

    Root cause
    Faulty deployment
    Component
    DatabaseDatabase backups and snapshots
    Contributing factor
    Unsafe failure behaviourMissed in reviewGap in automated testsUnrepresentative staging
    Detection

    Tickets about data availability were raised, the first on 9 February and more on 10 February, when the status page reported that some recent data was not showing up in query responses.

    Remediation
    • Rolled back the compaction change
    • Restored recent data first, rebuilt from the Kafka logs
    • Changed the restoration process to make historical data recovery more efficient
    • Restored historical data from the weekly TSM snapshots
    • Kept the cluster online and restored data incrementally so ingest and queries could continue
    Action items
    • Expand test coverage for changes to critical storage components such as the compactor, with scenarios closer to production-scale workloads
    • Strengthen safeguards around compaction so failures are detected and handled safely
    • Review restoration workflows and procedures to reduce elevated TTBR and slow queries during large restores
    • Revisit the backup and restore strategy to speed up cluster-wide restorations
    View case
  2. IL-0523 TANF-app production deployments were blocked for two months when a search-index migration ran out of database disk space
    U.S. Department of Health and Human Services2023
    Symptoms

    On 20 September 2023 the sprint 82 production deployment of TANF-app failed with a disk space error while it ran a large search-index migration, search_indexes 0017, against the production PostgreSQL database on cloud.gov. Production could not be deployed again until 9 November.

    Deploys failingNode disk full
    Trigger

    The sprint 82 deployment on 20 September 2023 recreated the deleted search_indexes migration 0016 and ran the large migration search_indexes 0017 against the production database.

    Root cause
    Faulty deployment
    Component
    DatabaseSchema migration
    Contributing factor
    Overlapping failuresGap in automated testsUnrepresentative stagingNo runbook
    Detection

    The sprint 82 production deployment failed with a disk space error, and the large migration search_indexes 0017 was identified as the cause.

    Remediation
    • Increased the production database instance size and re-ran the migrations
    • Created a backup of the production database
    • Truncated all of the search_indexes tables
    • Redeployed the sprint 82 release
    • Fixed the bug that stored empty fields as blank strings
    Action items
    • Write troubleshooting steps for database problems into the technical documentation
    • Write wiki pages and operations playbooks that outline common problems and responses
    • Add a database section and the cf revisions command to the failed-deployment troubleshooting document
    • Keep a GitHub repository of changes made directly to production
    • Save terminal output from production debugging sessions
    • Create Django migration best practices to enforce in code reviews
    • Do not edit migrations that have been merged to develop; write a new migration instead
    • Rename auto-generated migrations to more descriptive names
    • Use one auto-generated migration per model change and regenerate when a pull request makes successive changes
    • Organise a discussion on database seeding and backups for testing
    Lessons

    The work was unplanned and pulled in many developers from a small team, so the team wants documentation and playbooks that let fewer people step away from current work. Large datasets and unexpected edge cases such as rows without space-fill had not been tested, and a copy of the production database with PII scrubbed would allow tests against real-world data. Deploying in-progress code to other environments and changing migrations afterwards had caused conflicts there.

    View case
  3. IL-0328 A field type change in the database of CircleCI's job distribution service left all jobs stuck in "not running"
    CircleCI2021
    Symptoms

    From about 18:50 to 19:43 UTC on Monday, November 8, 2021, CircleCI customer jobs on all executors were blocked in a "not running" state. Errors and alerts appeared right after a deploy that changed a field type in the database of the job distribution service.

    Service outageHigh latencyScale-up failureCloud API rate limit exhausted
    Trigger

    At 18:50 UTC a deploy changed the type of a field in the PostgreSQL database of the job distribution service, in a way that was not backwards compatible.

    Root cause
    Faulty deployment
    Component
    DatabaseNode pool
    Contributing factor
    Ineffective rollbackExcessive blast radiusGap in automated tests
    Detection

    Errors and alerts related to the distribution failure appeared immediately after the 18:50 UTC deploy.

    Remediation
    • Rolled back the field type change, which did not clear the errors
    • Wrote, built and manually deployed a change that made the distribution system ignore the field
    • Manually scaled the primary compute cluster for the expected thundering herd of work
    • Monitored until processing was normal and resolved the incident
    Action items
    • Fix the gaps found in the testing strategy
    • Change how the distributor reacts to unexpected data so that this kind of deploy should not affect all jobs
    • Make recovery faster when unforeseen failures occur
    View case
Check your cluster for this

These 3 cases involve Database and Database backups and snapshots. kubegap audits a Kubernetes cluster for gaps like these, read-only, from Claude Code or Codex; its checks cite public reports like the ones in this library.

Open kubegap

By root cause1

Faulty deployment3 cases

Component
Database3Database backups and snapshots1Node pool1Schema migration1
Contributing factor
Gap in automated tests3Unrepresentative staging2Excessive blast radius1No runbook1Overlapping failures1Ineffective rollback1Missed in review1Unsafe failure behaviour1
Organisation
CircleCI1InfluxData1U.S. Department of Health and Human Services1
  1. IL-0380 A compaction change in InfluxDB Cloud us-east-1 dropped data from compacted files, and queries missed data for weeks
    InfluxData2026
  2. IL-0523 TANF-app production deployments were blocked for two months when a search-index migration ran out of database disk space
    U.S. Department of Health and Human Services2023
  3. IL-0328 A field type change in the database of CircleCI's job distribution service left all jobs stuck in "not running"
    CircleCI2021