jcoffey-dev
f6c228b87c
The estate could show an operator their infrastructure and had nothing to say to the business paying for it. Two storefronts and the gateway behind both fix that: Magento on two hosts, WooCommerce on one, and pay-01 carrying authorisations with amount, gateway and decline reason. Orders, revenue, average order value, where checkout loses people and why a card was refused now come out of the same log lines the operators are already reading, which is the argument for not running a separate metrics stack beside this one. Two platforms rather than one deliberately. Magento and WooCommerce write about the same events differently, so a panel that groups by service instead of assuming a single shape is the honest way to build one -- and the demo shows that rather than describing it. Order totals are built from a basket of real SKUs at real prices rather than drawn from a distribution, so average order value moves the way one actually moves. Declines rise during the seeded outage window alongside the 5xx rate, because whatever fails requests fails authorisations too. Twenty-seven new alert rules, thresholds calibrated against what the fleet actually emits -- measured on the demo's own week of history rather than guessed. A rule set at the average fires constantly and one set an order of magnitude above it never fires; these sit two to three times the steady-state rate, so they are quiet in normal operation and true during the diurnal peak or the seeded incident. Four are absence rules, because a domain controller or a storefront going silent is not a threshold question. Six new dashboards: fleet health, golden signals, security posture, capacity and storage, commerce, payments. Three limits of the query language found the hard way and worth writing down, because each was discovered by a panel failing rather than by reading: `dc()` does not exist -- the functions are count, sum, avg, min and max; `or` is not supported between structured filters, so a panel spanning tiers filters on the attribute they share and groups by service; and dashboards refuse raw SQL outright. The validator run over all 169 panels and 38 rules now checks every one of those, plus stages, viz types and comparators.
demo-seed
Everything the public demo deployment (demo.cairnobs.org) is built out
of, kept in the repo rather than only on the box so a demo can be rebuilt
from scratch and so its dashboards and rules are reviewable like any
other code.
reset-demo.sh— the nightly reset. Wipes every volume, brings the stack back up, re-seeds users, notification targets, a week of synthetic history, dashboards, and alert rules. Run from cron at 04:00 on the demo host.dashboards/*.json— one file per dashboard, in the shapePOST /dashboards/importconsumes (identical to whatGET /dashboards/{id}/exportand the web UI's Export JSON button produce, so a dashboard edited in the UI can be exported straight back into this directory).alerts/*.json.template— one file per alert rule, in the shapePOST /rulesconsumes.__TARGET_OPS__/__TARGET_SECURITY__/__TARGET_PLATFORM__are substituted at apply time with the IDs of the three notification targetsreset-demo.shcreates: every reset starts from an empty database, so the IDs can't be baked in.cairnobs-demo-simulator.service— systemd unit for the live half of the demo,/hack/demo-simulator. Installed at/etc/systemd/system/on the demo box.
The fleet
Fifty-four hosts, shaped like an estate rather than a stack: thirty-five Linux, eighteen Windows, and one Linux host whose agent is gone so the Agents page has something stale to show.
| Tier | Hosts |
|---|---|
| Edge and proxy | lb-01/02 (HAProxy), edge-01/02 (nginx), proxy-01 (Squid) |
| Application | api-01–04, worker-01–03, arm-build-01 (aarch64) |
| Data | db-01/02 (Postgres), mysql-01, cache-01/02 (Redis), mq-01/02 (RabbitMQ), search-01/02 (Elasticsearch) |
| Platform | k8s-node-01–03 (kubelet), ci-01 (Jenkins), vault-01, ldap-01 (OpenLDAP), dns-01 (BIND), backup-01, mail-01 |
| Commerce | shop-mag-01/02 (Magento), shop-woo-01 (WooCommerce), pay-01 (payment gateway) |
| Windows | DC-01/02, IIS-01–03, WIN-SQL-01/02, EXCH-01/02, FS-01/02, RDS-01/02, WIN-APP-01/02, PRINT-01, WSUS-01, SCCM-01 |
The Windows share is the point of the proportions. An enterprise looking at this should recognise its own estate, which means Windows carrying real services -- Active Directory, IIS, SQL Server, Exchange, file shares, Remote Desktop, print, WSUS and SCCM -- rather than appearing only as a Security channel on one box.
Two hosts carry stories the alert rules fire on and must not be moved:
worker-02's disk fills at 0.04 of the volume per day, which is what
worker-disk-filling thresholds against, and legacy-01 checks in once
and goes quiet, which is what agent-legacy-01-unavailable catches.
api-02 is the host the outage window hits.
Two storefronts, on purpose. Magento and WooCommerce write about the
same events differently, so a commerce panel that groups by service rather
than assuming one shape is the honest way to build one. Both feed pay-01,
whose authorisations carry amount, gateway and decline reason -- which is
what lets the Commerce and Payments dashboards answer revenue, average
order value, funnel drop-off and why a card was refused out of the same log
lines the operators are already reading. Declines rise during the seeded
outage window alongside the 5xx rate, because the dependency trouble that
fails requests fails authorisations too.
Volume. Fifty-four hosts generate about 346 records/minute at
-rate-scale 1, and the nightly reset runs at RATE_SCALE=0.5 over a
168-hour backfill -- roughly 2.2M records per reset, against about
0.5M when the fleet was twelve hosts. ClickHouse is untroubled by that;
what it costs is reset time and disk on the demo box. RATE_SCALE is the
lever if either becomes a problem, and lowering it keeps every host and
service present rather than dropping any of them.
Prefilled login
The demo's login page comes up with the read-only demo account already
in both fields, so a visitor doesn't need credentials handed to them.
That's a build-time opt-in, off everywhere else: the web image is built
with VITE_DEMO_USERNAME/VITE_DEMO_PASSWORD (set in the demo host's
docker-compose.override.yml), and the login page prefills only when it
has both. Any deployment that doesn't set them gets the ordinary empty
form -- see web/src/lib/api.ts's demoUsername.
The password is baked into the static bundle, which is fine for exactly
this case and nothing else: a Viewer-role account on a deployment whose
database is wiped and reseeded nightly. It has to match DEMO_PASSWORD
in reset-demo.sh, and changing that means rebuilding the web image.
Why the demo needs a long-running process
Three things the demo has to show are only true if data keeps arriving, and no amount of one-shot seeding fixes any of them:
- Agents. The Agents page is populated by the
AgentControl.CheckInRPC, and marks a host stale once it stops calling in. A fleet seeded once at 04:00 is entirely stale by 04:10. - Alerts. Rules evaluate over trailing windows (
earliest=-5m). Against a frozen dataset every rule settles into a permanent state within minutes and the Alerts page never moves again. - Recent views. A "last 15 minutes" dashboard, or a query for what just happened, is empty on a dataset that stopped growing overnight.
So the demo runs demo-simulator continuously, and reset-demo.sh only
handles the parts that genuinely are one-shot: the history behind the
present, and the dashboards and rules themselves.
Editing a dashboard
Change it in the web UI, hit Export JSON, and drop the file in
dashboards/ — the export shape and the import shape are the same one.
The next reset picks it up. (Note that panel IDs and the dashboard ID are
not part of that shape: every reset creates them fresh.)
What the queries can't do yet
Every panel here uses table, bar, top_n, single_stat, or
heatmap. None uses line, because a line chart needs a time axis and
the query language has no time-bucketing function — stats count by <field> groups by literal column values, so there's no equivalent of
Splunk's bin/timechart to group by hour or minute. Raw SQL could
express it (toStartOfHour(timestamp)), but dashboard panels reject the
SQL escape hatch by design, since the time-range picker works by
prepending earliest=/latest= terms to a pipe-syntax query
(see api/dashboards/types.go's validatePanel).
That gap is the one real thing standing between these dashboards and a conventional observability overview screen.