Cases3 cases

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1. IL-0028 Temporal History service latency rose because its pods were CPU-throttled while CPU usage read below 60 percent

   Temporal2023

   Symptoms

   Request latency from the Temporal Server History service, the service that starts workflow executions and records their progress, was higher and less steady than it should be on a self-hosted Kubernetes deployment. The CPU dashboard showed the history pods using less than 60 percent of their CPU, yet the same pods were being throttled.

   CPU throttlingHigh latency

   Trigger

   Normal load on History pods that had a CPU limit of 2 cores on 8-core nodes, with the Go runtime's GOMAXPROCS left at its default of one per node core.

   Root cause

   Capacity exhaustion

   Component

   Container CPU limitLanguage runtime settingsPrometheus

   Contributing factor

   Unreviewed defaultsMonitoring blind spot

   Detection

   A Prometheus query for CPU throttling showed the history pods throttled although their CPU usage read under 60 percent.

   Remediation

   • set the GOMAXPROCS environment variable to 2 to match the 2-core CPU limit

   Action items

   • Set GOMAXPROCS automatically from the Kubernetes CPU limit, from Temporal release 1.21.0

   Lessons

   A CPU usage graph averaged over 15 seconds or more can sit far below 100 percent while a container is being throttled, so throttling needs its own metric. A Go program in a container should have GOMAXPROCS matched to its CPU limit, or to its CPU request when it has no limit. The author recommends not using CPU limits at all.

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2. IL-0070 Critical pods on core nodes evicted when Prometheus began scraping about 200 nodes after a dask-gateway scale-up

   2i2c2023

   Symptoms

   The hub pod of the prod JupyterHub on the leap cluster (leap.2i2c.org) restarted unexpectedly during a large node scale-up, and a user opened a support ticket. The ingress-nginx and proxy pods kept running.

   Pod evictionPods Pending

   Trigger

   A user's dask-gateway workload added about 100 dask-worker nodes within a minute, and Prometheus started scraping the metrics exporters on about 200 nodes.

   Root cause

   Capacity exhaustion

   Component

   PrometheusNode pool

   Contributing factor

   No headroomExcessive blast radiusMonitoring blind spot

   Detection

   A user support ticket (2i2c Freshdesk ticket 414) about the leap hub; the engineer then looked at Grafana and the cluster's nodes and events.

   Action items

   • Configure CPU and memory requests for the hub and proxy pods (#2127; at least 100m CPU was proposed)
   • Make the Grafana OOMKiller dashboard work (#2213)
   • Move LEAP cloud infrastructure to shared nodes (#2209)
   • Update resource requests and limits, mainly for ingress-nginx and Prometheus (#2324)
   • Decide whether Prometheus should scrape dask worker pods (#2366)

   Lessons

   Prometheus load grows with the number of nodes, so a burst of autoscaled nodes can push a nearly full core node over the edge and evict the pods that matter most. Core pods that request 10m of CPU get a tenth of the CPU share of busy neighbours that request 100m. Kubernetes events expire after an hour, so evidence of OOM kills needs a dashboard that keeps it.

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3. IL-0035 Worker nodes went NotReady after a new ElastAlert rule without memory limits used up node memory

   NU.nl2019

   Symptoms

   The NU.nl development team got reports that several services on one of its Kubernetes clusters behaved erratically: occasional error pages, slow responses and timeouts. The affected services were mostly internal tools and dashboards.

   Node NotReadyHigh error rateHigh latencyIntermittent timeoutsMonitoring outageOOMKilled

   Trigger

   A new ElastAlert rule, deployed shortly before from the command line, that fired if the Cloudfront-* Elasticsearch indexes stopped receiving documents; those indexes take a few million requests per hour, and the rule made ElastAlert's memory grow without bound.

   Root cause

   Configuration change

   Component

   Container memory limitkubeletPrometheus

   Contributing factor

   No resource requests or limitsUnreviewed defaultsNo alert on limitMonitoring blind spotExcessive blast radius

   Detection

   Users reported error pages, slow responses and timeouts from several services; no alert fired.

   Remediation

   • terminated the NotReady nodes one by one so the auto-scaling group replaced them (the new nodes also went NotReady, but Prometheus and Grafana landed on a stable node)
   • found the ElastAlert pods' memory growth on the Grafana pod memory dashboard
   • fixed the ElastAlert problem that caused the memory growth

   Action items

   • Define alerts on resource usage such as CPU, memory and disk space
   • Keep researching an alerting strategy that combines Elasticsearch, Prometheus Alertmanager and New Relic
   • Consider exporting metrics out of the cluster and running Grafana outside it, on EC2 or a separate Kubernetes cluster
   • Either visualise the important metrics in the ELK stack or make Prometheus and Grafana more available, and improve the metrics strategy
   • Set resource limits for ElastAlert through the Helm values
   • Configure namespaces with default memory requests and limits
   • Isolate customer-facing workloads from build, logging and monitoring workloads (a dedicated node group, or later a separate tools cluster)
   • Deploy everything through automation such as Jenkins pipelines, and consider a GitOps approach
   • Deploy through a pipeline that includes a smoke test step
   • Make Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure work part of the team's sprints, picked up by all team members while pairing with more experienced members, and hold workshops that go deep into specific topics

   Lessons

   Fixing the root cause covers only a small part of what an incident can teach; the chain of smaller failures around it is where most of the learning is. A pod without a memory limit can take whole nodes down, so limits need defaults at the namespace level. Monitoring that runs inside the cluster it watches goes blind with it. Changes installed by hand from the command line leave the rest of the team without a record of what changed.

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