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>
Six containers, all loopback-published, reachable only through the gated diag. host:
victorialogs 30d retention, -http.pathPrefix=/logs so Caddy passes the prefix through unchanged
vector docker_logs + journald -> VictoriaLogs (elasticsearch bulk, the documented path)
victoriametrics 90d, scrapes the four taps that were already live plus the new services
vmalert-metrics 11 metric rules: disk, load, memory, RAID, restart loops, a core container gone
vmalert-logs 5 LogsQL rules: sweep failures, publish-deny bursts, failed bot deploys, cert trouble
alertmanager groups and inhibits, posts to Discord, webhook read from a 0600 file not the config
The deadman (bin/vanguard-deadman.sh, host timer, 5 min) is the part that does not trust any of the above:
curl only, it checks each component answers, that the always-firing Watchdog alert is still arriving through
vmalert -> Alertmanager -> dumpd /heartbeat, and the disks. It reports on change and announces recovery once.
Verified here: failures listed, silence when nothing changes, disk threshold, recovery fired once.
Collection uses the Docker socket (Phase 13 option A, chosen explicitly). That is root-equivalent on this host
and is recorded as such in vector.yaml with the two upgrade paths.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
