Incidents/2022-11-22 wdqs outage

From Wikitech

document status: draft

Summary

Incident metadata (see Incident Scorecard)
Incident ID 2022-11-22 wdqs outage Start 2022-11-22 15:15
Task T323620 End 2022-11-22 15:30
People paged 3 Responder count 2
Coordinators Gehel Affected metrics/SLOs wdqs
Impact For at least 15 minutes, users of the wikidata query service experienced a lack of service and/or extremely slow responses

…

For at least 15 minutes, users of the Wikidata Query Service either could not connect or received extremely slow responses.

Timeline

15:15 UTC

  • 15:16 dcausse, gehel and inflatador (Search Platform team and owners of the WDQS service) begin troubleshooting
  • 15:22 inflatador begins restarting all public wdqs hosts in eqiad datacenter. Alerts begin to clear. At this point, we presume the impact to users is over.
  • 15:34 inflatador finishes all restarts.
  • 16:11 (as I write this) load avg-15 remains at reasonable levels and we consider the service to be stabilized.

Detection

The issue was detected by monitoring (pybal alerts)

Example alert verbiage: PROBLEM - PyBal backends health check on lvs1020 is CRITICAL: PYBAL CRITICAL - CRITICAL - wdqs-heavy-queries_8888: Servers wdqs1015.eqiad.wmnet, wdqs1012.eqiad.wmnet, wdqs1004.eqiad.wmnet, wdqs1014.eqiad.wmnet, wdqs1016.eqiad.wmnet, wdqs1007.eqiad.wmnet,

The appropriate alerts fired, and contained enough actionable information for humans to quickly remediate the problem.

Conclusions

Search team has been aware of the brittle nature of WDQS for some time, and there are ongoing efforts to migrate off its current technology stack (specifically Blazegraph). We are also in the process of defining an SLO for WDQS.

What went well?

The appropriate alerts fired, and contained enough actionable information for humans to quickly remediate the problem.

What went poorly?

We're still investigating, but we believe one bad query caused this outage. A single user or query should not be able to take out an entire datacenter.

Where did we get lucky?

  • We were able to remediate once. Theoretically, the user could keep sending the bad query over and over again, causing the same effect for end-users.

Links to relevant documentation

Wikidata Query Service/Runbook

Actionables

  • Email to Wikidata Users list for awareness

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 yes
Were fewer than five people paged? yes
Were pages routed to the correct sub-team(s)? yes
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? no
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? no
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? yes
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? yes
Total score (count of all “yes” answers above) 10
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