2022-03-17: QA gprd-cny smoke failure

Incident DRI

@dchevalier2 @ahyield

Current Status

gitlab-org/gitlab!82756 (merged) caused gprd-cny smoke to fail, we needed to wait until: gitlab-org/gitlab!83050 (merged) gets deployed to gprd so we have a green pipeline.

Summary for CMOC notice / Exec summary:

  1. Customer Impact: none
  2. Service Impact: deployment
  3. Impact Duration: 3.5h
  4. Root cause: gitlab-org/gitlab!82756 (merged) caused gprd-cny smoke to fail, we needed to wait until: gitlab-org/gitlab!83050 (merged) gets deployed to gprd so we have a green pipeline. #6629 (comment 879037010)

Timeline

Recent Events (available internally only):

All times UTC.

2022-03-17

  • 16:22 - @ahyield declares incident in Slack.
  • 16:52 - @dchevalier2 chimes in and spots the problem.
  • 19:59 - @skarbek declares incident mitigates

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Takeaways

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Corrective Actions

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Incident Review
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Customer Impact

  1. Who was impacted by this incident? (i.e. external customers, internal customers)
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  2. What was the customer experience during the incident? (i.e. preventing them from doing X, incorrect display of Y, ...)
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  3. How many customers were affected?
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  4. If a precise customer impact number is unknown, what is the estimated impact (number and ratio of failed requests, amount of traffic drop, ...)?
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What were the root causes?

  • gitlab-org/gitlab!82756 (merged) updated the e2e specs to prevent test failures from occurring when gitlab-org/gitlab!82352 (merged) is merged. The test was updated successfully, but a :requires_admin tag in the test was also needed now that the test toggles a feature flag. This tag is to prevent the test from being run in environments where we can't have an admin account which is why it didn't fail until it reached one.

Incident Response Analysis

  1. How was the incident detected?
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  2. How could detection time be improved?
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  3. How was the root cause diagnosed?
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  4. How could time to diagnosis be improved?
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  5. How did we reach the point where we knew how to mitigate the impact?
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  6. How could time to mitigation be improved?
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  7. What went well?
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Post Incident Analysis

  1. Did we have other events in the past with the same root cause?
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  2. Do we have existing backlog items that would've prevented or greatly reduced the impact of this incident?
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  3. Was this incident triggered by a change (deployment of code or change to infrastructure)? If yes, link the issue.
    1. gitlab-org/gitlab!82756 (merged)

What went well?

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Guidelines

Resources

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Edited by Ahmad Tolba