Observability was running but could not report anything. This closes that end to end and
makes every piece of it reproducible from the installers instead of from a shell history.
Logs
- Filebeat 9 REMOVED the container input; it refuses the config per container and then runs
with zero harvesters and no index. Container logs now use filestream + the container parser
with a stable id each, and add_docker_metadata is told where the id is.
- Every line gets event.dataset, or Kibana's Logs rate chart is one "unknown" bucket.
- Beats pin replicas to 0: a single node cannot place one, so the cluster sat yellow forever.
Security
- xpack.security.enabled=true, because Kibana's Observability apps ask Elasticsearch whether
the user holds a privilege and that API does not exist when security is off (the
Infrastructure page failed on every view). Nobody sees a login: Kibana's anonymous provider
signs every visitor in as one native user, and Caddy + Authentik + DIAG_REQUIRE_GROUP stays
the only gate. configure.py generates the service passwords, creates the accounts and writes
a root-only netrc for the deadman; --es-security retries just that step.
Alerting
- A basic licence has no webhook connector (403, Gold+), so Kibana's rules write documents into
a vanguard-alerts index through the free .index connector and vanguard-alerts.timer delivers
them to Discord. Alerts are therefore searchable beside the logs that caused them.
- Six rules in observability/kibana-alarms.py: disk and memory below 15% free, bot not running,
bot unhealthy, recordings stuck over an hour, normalise failures parked. Each repeats every
12 h while unresolved.
- The deadman watches both halves of that pipeline, since nothing inside the stack can report
that the stack's own alerting died.
Our own metrics
- bin/vgmetrics.sh counters from the sweep and vgdeband, plus live gauges on dumpd /metrics
(loopback only, unrouted by Caddy), scraped by Metricbeat. vanguard_media_pending is the
measured answer to whether normalising keeps up, which was previously only a benchmark guess.
- The sweep now captures ffmpeg's stderr: rc= alone was not diagnosable.
- Its file loop reads a process substitution, not a pipe, or the subshell discards every counter.
Housekeeping
- configure.py --apply installs the media scripts (it never did, so applies left stale binaries),
creates the alert index, injects an ILM delete phase and runs Kibana's first-run setup.
- The discord-bot container asks the bot about itself via /health rather than probing a port.
- Removed the dead diag landing page: Kibana occupies the root of that host.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both Beats already wrote to the same Elasticsearch, but a metric event carried container.name while a log
event carried service.name and vanguard.category, so nothing joined them and a dashboard could only show the
two side by side. Metricbeat now runs add_docker_metadata and the same copy_fields, giving both sides
@timestamp, host.name, container.name, service.name and vanguard.category.
LOGGING.md documents the join keys and the one Kibana step that makes it work: a single data view over
filebeat-*,metricbeat-* so one filter applies to metric panels and log panels together.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
addCommunityMediaServer.sh asks for the diag hostname, DNS-checks it and passes it to --hosts, so a rebuild
sets it up like every other host instead of leaving it to be discovered missing.
HOSTNAME-CHANGE.md gains §D, adding a new host, which is where the hour went: --apply is stateless and reads
hostnames back out of the Caddyfile, so it silently omits a role that is not already there and the name ends
up with no certificate. README and the Phase 13 checklist now point at --full or --hosts instead of --apply,
and the plan's risks section carries the same warning plus the path-prefix cascade.
LOGGING.md collects the four traps this produced so none of them is rediscovered. FRESH-INSTALL gains an
ordered §7b and appendix M for the diag host, including that running without a webhook is correct rather than
half-configured; the old Afterwards section is relettered N.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deploying before the webhook exists is deliberate, so it must not depend on Alertmanager tolerating an empty
webhook_url_file — which I could not verify. configure.py now generates the config and omits the Discord
notifier entirely when ALERT_WEBHOOK_URL is unset: the receiver exists, drops notifications, and alerts still
evaluate, group and show at /alerts. Setting the variable and re-applying turns delivery on. The URL stays in
/etc/vanguard/alert-webhook rather than the config, because that file can be 0640 root:65534 for the
container's user while the repo copy cannot.
alertmanager.example.yml is the reference copy and is gitignored in generated form, like the other configs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
install.sh: the three data dirs with correct owners (uid 1000 for the VictoriaMetrics pair, 65534 for
alertmanager), /var/lib/vanguard, the deadman script and timer, and /etc/vanguard/alert-webhook as a FILE —
compose bind-mounts it, so without it Docker creates a directory and alertmanager will not start.
configure.py: --full now asks for the alert webhook and stores it; --show says plainly when none is set; the
webhook lands at 0640 root:65534 rather than world-readable, since it is a credential for that channel.
The deadman no longer assumes a webhook. It trims and validates the file (the previous -s test passed on the
newline configure.py writes), skips delivery when there is none, still logs every finding, and exits non-zero
only when it found something it could not report — so the unit state is the signal. Verified for a missing
file, a newline-only file, a junk value, and the healthy case.
check.sh validates all five observability configs; confirmed it catches a deliberate break.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Alerting is vmalert against its stats endpoints plus Alertmanager for delivery, and that covers log conditions
only: disk, load and restart loops are metrics and additionally need VictoriaMetrics over the four taps. Four
containers for the full picture, which is why a forty-line timer posting to the Discord webhook comes first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Records the store decision (VictoriaLogs over ELK and over Grafana+Loki, with the reasons), the hostname and
path, the collector choice, and the one real decision left for build time: how Vector reads container logs
without handing it root through the Docker socket. Also a design note for the later ops controls, so restart
buttons end up as allowlisted dumpd endpoints rather than a web page with Docker access.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
POST /deploy-bot may now carry X-Vanguard-Env, base64 JSON of the bot's own settings, and the HMAC covers
that header together with the body so the pair cannot be separated or swapped. dumpd merges only the keys
BOT_ENV_KEYS allows (DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN, DISCORD_GUILD_ID by default) into the stack .env, atomically and
preserving mode and owner, and reports the rest to the CI job as settings_refused. The server keeps what it
generates: a CI job cannot touch the database password or the Authentik keys.
Verified: allowed keys applied, server-owned keys refused while the rest still applied, a settings swap
after signing rejected with 401, and an empty settings header leaving .env untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
dumpd gains POST /deploy-bot on the bridge-only auth port: HMAC-SHA256 over the body with BOT_DEPLOY_SECRET,
a 300 MB cap, one install at a time, and the installer's output returned in the response so the CI job shows
it. BOT_DEPLOY_AUTO=0 makes the server refuse. configure.py generates the secret, writes both settings into
/etc/vanguard/deploy.env, installs deployBotBundle.sh as /usr/local/bin/vanguard-deploy-bot and creates
/srv/bot/app; --show prints what to paste into Gitea.
Chose this over mounting the Docker socket into job containers, which would give every CI job root on the
host. Also moved threading/subprocess to dumpd's module imports, which the new module-level lock needs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Store-agnostic: journald + Docker logs are the only taps any collector (Alloy/Loki, VictoriaLogs, Netdata) needs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
