Cases2 cases

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1. IL-0110 A Grafana Agent pod's high memory use and crash-looping Hangfire pods drove a Kubernetes node into system OOM and NotReady, twice in one day

   DFDS2024

   Symptoms

   At 10:01 UTC on 2024-03-13 a Kubernetes node entered NotReady state, with CPU requests at 78% and memory requests at 82%. An alert fired in Slack at 10:03 and was picked up at 10:05. An attempt to SSH into the node at 10:13 failed because it was unresponsive; it started responding again at 10:19.

   Node NotReadyContainer crash loopOOMKilledMonitoring outage

   Trigger

   Pods of a dev container that used Hangfire to trigger jobs failed with OOM and crash-looped on a node where a Grafana Agent pod was already using a lot of memory.

   Root cause

   Capacity exhaustion

   Component

   Telemetry agentContainer memory limitDatabase

   Contributing factor

   Excessive blast radiusNo resource requests or limitsHarmful manual actionMonitoring blind spot

   Detection

   A Slack alert fired two minutes after the node went NotReady and was picked up two minutes later; the second node's NotReady at 15:03 also raised a Slack alert.

   Remediation

   • marked the EC2 instance unhealthy so a new node started
   • cordoned and force-drained the NotReady node and terminated its EC2 instance
   • removed the new LimitRange from the Grafana Agent namespace and restarted the Grafana Agent pod
   • scaled the dev container to 0 replicas, after which EC2 network traffic returned to normal
   • after the second NotReady, scaled the dev container to 0 replicas again and added a new node
   • emailed the team that owns the dev container, which confirmed it was working on a fix

   Action items

   • Move grafana-agent to the monitoring node group
   • Add alerts for when bandwidth across the cluster reaches a certain threshold
   • Investigate whether memory limits can be set on the grafana-agent Helm chart
   • Investigate grafana-agent memory usage
   • Ask Grafana support whether grafana-agent should use a PVC
   • Consider pushing node logs to Loki with limited retention
   • Create a wiki page with common metrics and log queries to check when investigating issues with Kubernetes nodes

   Lessons

   Dev workloads mixed with production let one crash-looping dev container take down nodes that production also used, and a monitoring agent outside its dedicated node group added to the memory pressure. Scaling the suspect container back up before its owners had fixed it brought the failure back on the replacement node. The team also noted that action items from earlier post-mortems need follow-up, and that knowledge of useful CloudWatch metrics had not been shared, which made the diagnosis harder.

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2. IL-0107 Kyverno stuck in a crash loop behind a webhook with failurePolicy fail blocked every change to Kubernetes Service objects for 88 minutes

   DFDS2022

   Symptoms

   At 11:38 UTC on 3 August 2022 an end-user team told the platform team that applying a Service resource to one of the Kubernetes clusters failed.

   Deploys failingContainer crash loop

   Trigger

   A certificate chain in a third-party application expired, through no action of DFDS, and the outdated Kyverno installation got stuck in a crash loop.

   Root cause

   Certificate or credential expiry

   Component

   Policy engineAdmission webhook

   Contributing factor

   Deferred upgradesUnreviewed defaultsMonitoring blind spotIgnored early signal

   Detection

   An end-user team alerted the platform team at 11:38 UTC that applying a Service resource failed; the platform team started looking into it at 11:50 UTC.

   Remediation

   • reproduced the issue in a sandbox cluster and deployed the fix there first
   • updated Kyverno to a newer Helm chart version in the affected production cluster

   Action items

   • Implement monitoring on Kyverno
   • Create internal documentation on the Kyverno setup
   • Investigate the exact certificate issue in the third-party application
   • Consider changing the failurePolicy on ClusterPolicy resources going forward

   Lessons

   Operational issues should be added to the 'Ops Day to Day' board from the start.

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