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Incidents/2024-04-26 Search unavailable for some eqiad users

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document status: draft

Summary

Incident metadata (see Incident Scorecard)
Incident ID 2024-04-26 Search unavailable for some eqiad users Start 2024-04-24 19:27 UTC
Task T363516 End 2024-04-26 13:31 UTC
People paged 0 Responder count 5
Coordinators Brian King Affected metrics/SLOs
Impact During the outage window, users connected to the primary (eqiad) datacenter may have had incomplete search results, messages saying "try your search again," and/or a lack of autocomplete.

Timeline

All times in UTC.

  • graph showing increased error rates for requests to the Elastic cluster
    graph showing increased error rates for requests to the Elastic cluster
    2024-04-24 20:22 Search platform SREs merge this change and pool the new hosts, bringing elastic110[3-7] into the search cluster. Upstream error rate (as recorded from Envoy) begins to rise from < 0.1% to above 1%.
  • 2024-04-25 03:13 Daily index update job for English Wikipedia fails at 44% due to connection problems from the maintenance host mwmaint1002 to the production eqiad Search cluster. Unfortunately, the incomplete index is promoted to production. Missing search results are reported by users in this Phab task.
  • 2024-04-25 21:18 English Wikipedia index rebuild finishes successfully. Users now get a complete set of results, but error rate remains unacceptably high at ~1%.
  • 2024-04-26 09:36 Dcausse (Search Platform SWE) points autocomplete Search traffic from the primary to secondary datacenter (codfw).
  • 2024-04-26 13:31 At Dcausse's request, Akosiaris (SRE) depools the hosts that were pooled in step 1. Error rate drops back to normal, ending user impact. Ebernhardson, Dcausse and Bking (Search platform SWE/SRE) continue troubleshooting.
  • 2024-04-26 16:34 Bking repools elastic1105 , which causes the error rate to shoot up again. Ebernhardon (Search Platform SWE) runs connectivity tests from mwmaint1002; they show a ~5% failure rate.
  • 2024-04-26 16:55 Cmooney (SRE, Network SME) joins troubleshooting call. With his help, we're able to isolate the connection problems down to 2 hosts: elastic1105 and 1107. He identifies missing VLAN sub-interfaces on LVS load-balancer hosts and pushes a puppet patch to correct this.
  • 2024-04-26 17:19 Cmooney completes push of changes to lvs1019 and validates that the required connectivity is now in place and working so elastic1105 and elastic1107 are reachable from it at L2.
  • 2024-04-26 17:28 Bking repools elastic1103-1107 and confirms that no new errors have been logged. Ebernhardson and Bking decide to wait until Monday to repool Search autocomplete at the datacenter level.
  • 2024-04-29 13:30 Switch autocomplete Search traffic back to eqiad

Detection

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

Humans reported an error via this Phab task

Diagnosis

The problem turned out to be that two of the new hosts, elastic1105 and elastic1107, were in racks E5 and F5 in eqiad. That ought not to be a problem, but there had been an omission when provisioning the new vlans in these racks when they went live in early April. Specifically the new vlans assigned for the racks were not configured on our LVS load-balancers, which need to be on the same vlan as any backend server they have to send traffic to. The omission meant any time the new elastic hosts were selected by the load-balancer it tried and failed to connect to them, resulting in the errors. The fix was to add the configuration via puppet to create new vlan sub-interfaces on the LVS hosts so they had direct connectivity to new the racks/hosts.

Conclusions

What went well?

  • Part of the problem (incomplete search results) was detected and mitigated quickly.

What went poorly?

  • Detection took too long
    • Lack of monitoring
    • Bad healthcheck, or the architecture of Pybal cannot detect this type of connection failure.

Where did we get lucky?

Actionables

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 paging happened
Were pages routed to the correct sub-team(s)? no No paging happened
Were pages routed to online (business hours) engineers?  Answer “no” if engineers were paged after business hours. no No paging happened
Process Was the "Incident status" section atop the Google Doc kept up-to-date during the incident? no
Was a public wikimediastatus.net entry created? no Search SRE have never done it
Is there a phabricator task for the incident? yes
Are the documented action items assigned? yes
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.

no
Were the people responding able to communicate effectively during the incident with the existing tooling? yes
Did existing monitoring notify the initial responders? no
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)
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