2022-05-31: QA failing in production

Incident Roles

The DRI for this incident is the incident issue assignee, see roles and responsibilities.

Roles when the incident was declared:

• Incident Manager (IMOC): @afappiano
• Engineer on-call (EOC): @mchacon3

Current Status

QA is failing in production, it is not currently known if this is a new issue, or if we are bumping against the limits of a particular query timeout, or if the project for which we run QA on, is simply too large. Investigation continues...

Summary for CMOC notice / Exec summary:

1. Customer Impact: none
2. Service Impact: ServiceGitLab Rails
3. Impact Duration: 4:59 - end time UTC ( duration in minutes )
4. Root cause: TBD

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.

2022-05-31

• 12:59 - QA Begins on package - 15.1.202205310620-a0ee51d4dfa.3b8b8e377b8 - https://ops.gitlab.net/gitlab-org/release/tools/-/pipelines/1233301
• 15:05 - Release Manager creates issue - gitlab-org/release/tasks#3955 (closed) for tracking QA failures
• 15:15 - Suspected flakey test: gitlab-org/gitlab#358213 (closed)
• 16:29 - Identified this issue is cause: gitlab-org/gitlab#359043 (closed)
• 16:38 - Suspect FF change could be cause: gitlab-org/gitlab#360757 (closed)
• 17:06 - Suspect FF changed to false
• 17:22 - QA continues to fail
• 18:04 - @skarbek declares incident in Slack.
• 18:29 - An expensive query may be at fault: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/ee/app/services/elastic/process_initial_bookkeeping_service.rb#L28
• 18:51 - The expensive query is identified as a future improvement - gitlab-org/gitlab#364045 (closed) - We will shift our focus towards cleaning up the data in hopes that we can push forward until this issue can be scheduled
• 19:04 - After enough retries, QA finally passed - we will still pursue attempting to either cleanup and/or move to a new group such that we avoid potential issues with this moving forward until this query is improved
• 19:41 - Begin CR to clean up QA - #7176 (closed)
• 20:44 - Above CR is complete
• 20:55 - Final QA we were waiting on completed successfully - issue marked as resolved

2022-06-01

• 10:29 - Incident reopened due to same failures
• 13:50 - Decision to quarantine the test is made - gitlab-org/gitlab!89041 (merged)

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Use the following links to create related issues to this incident if additional work needs to be completed after it is resolved:

• Corrective action
• Investigation followup
• Confidential / Support contact
• QA investigation
• Infradev

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Customer Impact

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What were the root causes?

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Incident Response Analysis

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Post Incident Analysis

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Resources

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