Date

19 Oct 2020

Authors

Andy Nash (Unlicensed) Joseph (Pepe) Kelly John Simmons (Deactivated) Andy Dingley Simon Meredith (Unlicensed) Paul Hoang (Unlicensed) Sachin Mehta (Unlicensed)

Status

LiveDefect resolved. Actions being ticketed up (Andy Nash (Unlicensed))

Summary

On Friday evening we noticed the server used to build our applications and run scheduled jobs was struggling. It then crashed, subsequently causing ETL (scheduled data flows between systems) and data related issues. Systems used to search, transfer and display data in TIS along with data stores then also froze between Friday and Saturday

Impact

Users unable to search for trainees.

Staging environment was not updated with production data on Saturday as scheduled

No data synchronisation between systems

0600 Friday 16th October 2020

We have a system to automatically upgrade versions of software, and keep these versions and dependencies between systems synchronised. This ensures software is patched and up to date. A large number of these upgrades were triggered at one time which caused our build server to build the application multiple times in order to run the automated tests against them prior to deployment.

0630 Friday 16th October 2020

One of our search servers failed

0730 Friday 16th October 2020

More search server failures

Stage environment suffers various server failures

1630 Friday 16th October

Build server fails

0110 Saturday 17th October

High number of messages in ESR system waiting to be processed

0600 Saturday 17th October

ESR scheduled job process failed to start

0800 Saturday 17th October

Multiple server failures by this point and TIS search non-operational

First trigger

• c. 6am

• 2020-10-16 06:33

• 2020-10-16 06:36

• 2020-10-16 06:42

• 2020-10-16 06:??

Friday

• Patch comes out for the kernel

• ESR Data exporter triggered a build of outstanding PRs (resulting from Dependabot - upgrade at Git repo level)

• one ES cluster node failed

• amazon-ssm-agent kicked off an apt upgrade (at OS level): which included xxd, python 2.7, vim, python 2.6, linux AWS 5.4 headers.

• old versions of xxd, python 2.7, vim, python 2.6, linux AWS 5.4 headers were removed - the upgrades were auto-applied without a restart via LivePatch.

Starting Friday and continuing over the weekend

• 2020-10-16 07:18

• 2020-10-16 07:38

• 2020-10-16 07:38
  

• 2020-10-16 07:58

• 2020-10-16 08:43

• 2020-10-16 12:03

• 2020-10-16 16:38

Friday

• Staging RabbitMQ node 2 down (PH)

• Prod ES node 3 down (PH)

• Prod ES node 1 & 2 down - additional alert of too few nodes running - at this point, prod person search should not be working
  

• Staging ES node 2 down (PH)

• Phil W asks what this all means, Phil J summaries (PH)

• Old concerns on green&blue stage goes down (PH)

• Jenkins goes down (PH)

because of sharding, users may have been seeing only partial results at this point) (PH) 👈 need to look into and confirm this assumption…

Then

• 6am

• 2020-10-17 01:13

• 2020-10-17 01:28

• 2020-10-17 06:00

• 2020-10-17 06:00

• 2020-10-17 06:02

• 2020-10-17 07:08

• 2020-10-17 07:18

• 2020-10-17 07:33

• 2020-10-17 07:43

Saturday

• Patch comes out for the kernel

• High messages in RabbitMQ Prod (PH)

• High messages in RabbitMQ Staging (PH)

• ESR n-d-l cron job didn’t start - manually kicked by Paul at 10:08, exited at 10:09

• ESR ETL

• ES Docker container failure (see Sachin’s snippet on Slack channel)

• Staging ES node 2 down, Prod RabbitMQ node 3 down (PH)

• Staging ES node 1 & 3 down (PH)

• Staging RabbitMQ node 1 & 3 down (PH)

• Prod Mongo goes down (PH)

…at this point ☝ pretty much everything is being effected by the combination of issues

👇 shall I remove this section of the timeline completely from this incident log? Seems overkill, given pretty much everything was down at this point

• 2020-10-17 08:48

• 2020-10-17 09:27

• 2020-10-17 10:23

• 2020-10-17 10:23

• 2020-10-18 02:42

• 2020-10-18 07:37

• 2020-10-18 10:23

• 2020-10-18 10:25

• 2020-10-18 07:37

• 2020-10-19 01:29

• 2020-10-19 07:46

• 2020-10-19 08:59

• 2020-10-19 07:54

• 2020-10-19 08:17

• 2020-10-19 10:35

• 2020-10-17

Saturday




Sunday





Monday







Tuesday

• (see Prometheus graph below)

• (see Prometheus graph below)

• D/B Prod/Stage sync started but never completed

• NDW ETL: Stage (PaaS) failed

• ESR Sentry errors x 7 (reappearance of the same issue across all services)

• TCS ES sync job failed to run/complete on either blue or green servers

• NDW ETL: Stage (PaaS) failed

• NDW ETL: Stage (current) failed

• TCS ES sync job failed to run/complete on either blue or green servers

• TCS ES Person sync job failed (None of the configured nodes were available)

• Users started reporting problems using Search on Prod

• Users reporting problems using Search on Prod had been resolved

• (see Prometheus graph below)

• (see Prometheus graph below)

• (see Prometheus graph below)

• Massive Sentry hit, on ESR, using up our entire monthly allocation

0. Spike the creation an Ansible config to do a full restart (John Simmons (Deactivated) to complete the description of this) - in case we come across this situation happening again.

Ops

To do

1. bump up the Jenkins RAM to 32Gb (short term ONLY). Add a reminder to revisit this in 1 month / 2 months?

Ops

Done

2. disable integration tests on ESR projects for PR pipeline (they’d still run on merge to master, rather than each PR). These are what fire up the local stack and test containers (hold back on…'if we’re not planning to do any further ESR work once Leeerrroooy leave, we could just disable the integration tests in ESR')
ESR guys not keen at all on this. Risk of breaking the pipeline and blocking anything thereafter. When you need them the most… don’t have tests switched off!
2. Code in AWS S3 creds to save firing up local stack. Need to be careful setting this up. Shared bucket for integration tests across Reval, TISSS as well. With archiving rules deleting everything >5 days old.
See ‘diet’ ticket below - lots of work, but an investment that will have its uses across all products within the TIS portfolio

ESR & others

To do

3. Close outstanding ESR major version change PRs - how many is ‘critical mass’? But without being blazé about approving PRs. Ignore minor versions.

Sachin

To do

Consider ways to reduce system resources instead?
Discussed with Doris and ESR team last week…

4. Restrict the number of PRs Dependabot opens on each ESR project to 1 and to major versions only (given they’re microservices, we still might get significant numbers).
There are dependencies between PRs. So restricting to one might have a chain reaction. No getting round that things like this will need manual intervention.
So let’s see how restricting to major versions affects things and decide on further action if needed at that point.

AndyD

To do

5. Use Jenkins pipeline rather than node - to make things sequential rather than concurrent

disableConcurrentBuilds
Disallow concurrent executions of the Pipeline. Can be useful for preventing simultaneous accesses to shared resources, etc. For example: options { disableConcurrentBuilds() }

AndyD / Pepe

To do

Pipelines not written to take advantage of extra nodes - is the time investment required greater than the benefit

6. Address https://hee-tis.atlassian.net/browse/TISNEW-5613 quickly (removing local stack from the Data exporter process).
Needs refining and sub-tasking with ESR and perm team, before ESR disappear.

ESR & perm team

To do

Spike ticket completed this Sprint. This ticket is the result of that Spike.

7. The ElasticSearch nightly sync shouldn’t be necessary. Verify that ElasticSearch is being updated properly during the day.

Pepe

To do

TBC

1. Jenkins

2. ESR containers taking up all the resource

3. Too many (Dependabot) PRs outstanding, builds, rebasing

4. ESR did not have time to action them because of the launch of new world code

1. Underlying OS upgrade occurred and was applied (LivePatch)

2. Probably something to do with that very specific update (it’s never happened before and has been running since the Apps were built

3. Did Docker struggle with the patch, rather than Amazon making a mistake with applying the patch (no complaints on Amazon forums, so looks quite specific to us)

4. Version of Docker is linked to whatever’s available in apt

5. Not worth changing our set up for the sake of a ‘freak’ occurrence that probably will only happen once every 3 years? Or scheduling the OS upgrades to a better time / day, so we can actively check that they’ve done what they were expected to do, and not caused conflicts. We can then determine whether a full restart immediately afterwards would be sensible too.

Jenkins could to with some TLC. ES went down too (before Jenkins). However, there is an underlying OS update issue that triggered everything.

It destabilised the system, stopping Docker. When Docker was manually restarted on Monday morning, everything started coming back up again. And stability was restored.

Initial discussion, along with short and longer term actions

What can we do about Dependabot creating and building simultaneously?

Dependabot does run sequentially, but much faster than Jenkins can process things so everything appears concurrent.

We could get Dependabot to add a GitHub label to the PR - add something to the Jenkins file to read the label and mark as “Don’t run”. But this stops Dependabot being useful.

ESR preoccupied with launching New World, understandably!

Can perm team keep on top of ESR stuff when they leave?

Even when keeping on top of things, will it eventually be too much anyway?
Or is it simply a case of the team not controlling the overall number of open PRs?

Original Jenkins build was never designed to handle this much load - underlying architecture isn’t there for the level of automation we now have. It is designed for a single node, not load-balancing

Is Jenkins the right tool for everything it’s being asked to do? No:

1. bump up the Jenkins RAM to 32Gb (short term ONLY). Add a reminder to revisit this in 1 month / 2 months?

2. disable integration tests on ESR projects for PR pipeline (they’d still run on merge to master, rather than each PR). These are what fire up the local stack and test containers (hold back on…'if we’re not planning to do any further ESR work once Leeerrroooy leave, we could just disable the integration tests in ESR')

3. Close outstanding ESR PRs - how many is ‘critical mass’? But without being blazé about approving PRs

4. Restrict the number of PRs Dependabot opens on each ESR project to 1 (but given they’re microservices, it still might be a big number). Not much of a concern if we do 2. above.

5. The ElasticSearch nightly sync shouldn’t be necessary. Verify that ElasticSearch is being updated properly during the day.

6. move ETLs over to ECS tasks (serverless ‘run container' instructions to AWS - not reliant on our infrastructure).
   This would remove the dependency on Jenkins - so if it went down, the jobs could continue. N.B. This doesn’t apply to the ElasticSearch job.
   Don’t do scheduled jobs / anything with a timer - use Cron server instead for this stuff.
   Just use Jenkins as a build server (Metabase also runs on Jenkins, but doesn’t use much)

7. ticket up addressing our infrastructure so that the set up ESR have created does run - it’s been done right!

8. get ourselves a dedicated Jenkins server (what size )

9. move to ElasticSearch SaaS