Cases2 cases

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1. IL-0435 Error rates rose as Aurora MySQL killed connections and declined queries to avoid OOM while load metrics stayed flat

   CyberAgent2026

   Symptoms

   An alert fired one day because an application's error rate had suddenly risen. The error log of the Aurora MySQL RDS instance for that time showed Aurora killing connections and declining queries to avoid running out of memory. The killed queries also made application latency worse.

   High error rateMemory pressure

   Trigger

   An application release added a batch job run every minute by a Kubernetes CronJob. Each run's short-lived pod connected to the database from a new pod IP.

   Root cause

   Capacity exhaustion

   Component

   DatabaseJobs and CronJobs

   Contributing factor

   Unreviewed defaultsChange with a delayed effect

   Detection

   An alert fired on the application's error rate.

   Remediation

   • Set performance_schema to manual management and capped two related Performance Schema parameters, unlimited by default, at 100 in the parameter group, then restarted the RDS instance

   Lessons

   When system alerts fire but the database's load metrics look calm, Performance Schema growth is worth suspecting. The two parameters that were capped are unlimited by default, so connections from ever-changing source addresses keep adding to the records. Capping them has a cost: once the cap is exceeded, per-host figures in Performance Insights are missing. Putting RDS Proxy between the application and Aurora MySQL to keep source hosts stable is another possible measure.

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2. IL-0434 Rolling restarts of a 30-node Elasticsearch 0.19 cluster after a host failure left 12 shards unassigned

   CyberAgent2016

   Symptoms

   After an OpenStack host server went down and took one Elasticsearch node with it, the health check that the API servers run against Elasticsearch returned false, although the Head plugin showed the cluster status as green. The check stayed false after the node was brought back and the cluster was green again.

   High latencyData loss

   Trigger

   An OpenStack host server went down, and one node of the Elasticsearch cluster went down with it.

   Root cause

   Operator error

   Component

   Elasticsearch or OpenSearch

   Contributing factor

   Unverified assumptionAutomation amplification

   Detection

   The health check that the API servers run against Elasticsearch returned false while the Head plugin showed the cluster as green.

   Remediation

   • Migrated the Elasticsearch node's virtual server to another host after the failed host recovered
   • Started the node's Elasticsearch process and let it rejoin the cluster
   • Restarted all nodes in order from node 1, pausing at about the twentieth when the API slowed
   • Restarted all nodes again from node 1, which ended the API delays but left 12 shards unassigned
   • Tried to move an unassigned shard with the allocate command of _cluster/reroute, which failed
   • For index A, copied node 22's shard files to nodes 3 and 10 and set primary to true in node 22's state file
   • For index B, deleted the broken shard files on node 27, copied node 28's files to node 27 and other nodes and marked node 28 primary
   • For index C, copied shards 2 and 4 from nodes 27 and 25 to two other nodes each and marked the copies as not primary

   Action items

   • Upgrade Elasticsearch and stop running such an old version

   Lessons

   Automatic shard reallocation should have been turned off before restarting nodes. After each node restart, the next node should have been restarted only after reallocation had completely finished, not just after the log file looked fine.

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