2022-04-06: uncontrolled HPA resizing caused by a GCP incident

Incident DRI

Current Status

For ~2 min, we were responding to most of the requests on all services with errors. image

Summary for CMOC notice / Exec summary:

  1. Customer Impact: for ~2 mins, majority of requests were failing
  2. Service Impact: all services running in GKE
  3. Impact Duration: 07:56:00 - 07:58:00 (2min)
  4. Root cause: GCP incident. Investigation issue - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/15569

Timeline

Recent Events (available internally only):

  • Deployments
  • Feature Flag Changes
  • Infrastructure Configurations
  • GCP Events (e.g. host failure)
  • Gitlab.com Latest Updates

All times UTC.

2022-04-06

  • 07:55:45 - pods in all k8s clusters start failing readiness checks
  • 07:56 - HAProxy errors start, cpu utilization on primary and replicas starts to drop
  • 07:57:00 - cpu utilization on primary and replias reaches bottom and starts to go up, total sum of db duration on replicas goes up
  • 07:57:30 - number of pods starts to go up above the previous number
  • 07:58:00 - cpu utilization on primary and replicas reaches similar levels from before the incident
  • 07:59:30 - number of pods reaches peak, roughly ~50% above what was before the incident
  • 08:01 - @mwasilewski-gitlab declares incident in Slack.
  • 08:08 - number of pods drops to the level from before the incident

Create related issues

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  • Support contact request
  • Corrective action
  • Investigation followup
  • Confidential issue
  • QA investigation
  • Infradev

Takeaways

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Corrective Actions

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Incident Review

  • Ensure that the exec summary is completed at the top of the incident issue, the timeline is updated and relevant graphs are included in the summary
  • If there are any corrective action items mentioned in the notes on the incident, ensure they are listed in the "Corrective Action" section
  • Fill out relevant sections below or link to the meeting review notes that cover these topics

Customer Impact

  1. Who was impacted by this incident? (i.e. external customers, internal customers)
    1. ...
  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?

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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.
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What went well?

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Guidelines

  • Blameless RCA Guideline

Resources

  1. If the Situation Zoom room was utilised, recording will be automatically uploaded to Incident room Google Drive folder (private)
Edited Apr 06, 2022 by Kennedy Wanyangu
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