Incidents/2022-08-24 swift

From Wikitech

document status: draft

Summary

Incident metadata (see Incident Scorecard)
Incident ID 2022-08-24 swift Start YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss
Task T316188 End YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss
People paged Responder count
Coordinators Affected metrics/SLOs
Impact For approximately 17h, media requests (mostly thumbnail reads, but also uploads) failed at a rate of ~2000 HTTP errors per minute. This caused approximately 1.9 million uncached media requests to upload.wikimedia.org to fail, and 609 unsuccessful upload attempts (this part was quite visible to Commons contributors).

Summary of what happened, in one or two paragraphs. Avoid assuming deep knowledge of the systems here, and try to differentiate between proximate causes and root causes.

Timeline

Write a step by step outline of what happened to cause the incident, and how it was remedied. Include the lead-up to the incident, and any epilogue.

Consider including a graphs of the error rate or other surrogate.

Link to a specific offset in SAL using the SAL tool at https://sal.toolforge.org/ (example)

All times in UTC.

  • 00:00 (TODO) OUTAGE BEGINS
  • 00:04 (Something something)
  • 00:06 (Voila) OUTAGE ENDS
  • 00:15 (post-outage cleanup finished)

TODO: Clearly indicate when the user-visible outage began and ended.

Detection

Write how the issue was first detected. Was automated monitoring first to detect it? Or a human reporting an error?

Copy the relevant alerts that fired in this section.

Did the appropriate alert(s) fire? Was the alert volume manageable? Did they point to the problem with as much accuracy as possible?

TODO: If human only, an actionable should probably be to "add alerting".

Conclusions

OPTIONAL: General conclusions (bullet points or narrative)

What went well?

OPTIONAL: (Use bullet points) for example: automated monitoring detected the incident, outage was root-caused quickly, etc

What went poorly?

OPTIONAL: (Use bullet points) for example: documentation on the affected service was unhelpful, communication difficulties, etc

Where did we get lucky?

OPTIONAL: (Use bullet points) for example: user's error report was exceptionally detailed, incident occurred when the most people were online to assist, etc

Links to relevant documentation

Add links to information that someone responding to this alert should have (runbook, plus supporting docs). If that documentation does not exist, add an action item to create it.

Actionables

Create a list of action items that will help prevent this from happening again as much as possible. Link to or create a Phabricator task for every step.

Add the #Sustainability (Incident Followup) and the #SRE-OnFIRE (Pending Review & Scorecard) Phabricator tag to these tasks.

Scorecard

Incident Engagement ScoreCard
Question Answer

(yes/no)

Notes
People Were the people responding to this incident sufficiently different than the previous five incidents? no
Were the people who responded prepared enough to respond effectively no
Were fewer than five people paged? no no pages at the time of impact starting
Were pages routed to the correct sub-team(s)? no
Were pages routed to online (business hours) engineers?  Answer “no” if engineers were paged after business hours. yes
Process Was the incident status section actively updated during the incident? yes
Was the public status page updated? no
Is there a phabricator task for the incident? yes
Are the documented action items assigned? no
Is this incident sufficiently different from earlier incidents so as not to be a repeat occurrence? yes
Tooling To the best of your knowledge was the open task queue free of any tasks that would have prevented this incident? Answer “no” if there are

open tasks that would prevent this incident or make mitigation easier if implemented.

yes
Were the people responding able to communicate effectively during the incident with the existing tooling? yes
Did existing monitoring notify the initial responders? no It did eventually, but not initially
Were the engineering tools that were to be used during the incident, available and in service? yes
Were the steps taken to mitigate guided by an existing runbook? no
Total score (count of all “yes” answers above) 7