2023-08-14: Strange robotic activity pattern of haproxy 5xx api_rate_limit responses over the past week
Customer Impact
No known customer impact.
Current Status
During the past 5-7 days of my on-call rotation week, I've noticed some strange robotic activity patterns of 5xx haproxy api_rate_limit responses.
Source: grafana
These patterns are remarkable in their abruptnes. They start and stop like a light switch.
These patterns are also differentiated from normal organic user traffic patterns by their lack of correlation with normal site activity patterns, as seen in the second graph of the first figure above.
I'd like to try to find the source of these requests, and find out who is being rate limited.
More information will be added as we investigate the issue. For customers believed to be affected by this incident, please subscribe to this issue or monitor our status page for further updates.
📚 References and helpful links
Recent Events (available internally only):
- Feature Flag Log - Chatops to toggle Feature Flags Documentation
- Infrastructure Configurations
- GCP Events (e.g. host failure)
Deployment Guidance
- Deployments Log | Gitlab.com Latest Updates
- Reach out to Release Managers for S1/S2 incidents to discuss Rollbacks, Hot Patching or speeding up deployments. | Rollback Runbook | Hot Patch Runbook
Use the following links to create related issues to this incident if additional work needs to be completed after it is resolved:
- Corrective action ❙ Infradev
- Incident Review ❙ Infra investigation followup
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