jcoffey-dev 5742901fc5 Say that Phase 4 shipped, and that the environment proving it is gone
The status file and the README both still said Phase 4 was not shipped
because the environment had lost Docker and database access partway
through, and that only the audit-logging guarantees had been confirmed
against a live database. That stopped being true some time ago.
phase-4-runbook.md records the opposite in detail: Docker access came
back, a real docker-compose stack ran with real ClickHouse and Postgres
and two provisioned tenants, a local kind cluster ran the Helm chart end
to end, and both SSO protocols were verified against a real Auth0 tenant
with full browser round trips. Eight real bugs came out of that, six from
compose and two from the chart's first real install -- none of them
findable without the infrastructure.

PROJECT-SPEC.md sends readers to status.md and tells them to read it
before assuming a capability works end to end, so the one file that is
meant to be authoritative was the one understating the project by the
widest margin.

Correcting it matters more now than it would have last week, because the
evidence cannot be regenerated: proto.cairnobs.org and the VPS under it
were retired on 2026-09-04, taking the mTLS CA, the server certificate
and six enrolled agents with them. The runbooks are what is left.

Three gaps are now stated rather than implied:

The prototype is gone, so none of this can be re-run today without
building one. The DNS was kept for that; the certificates deliberately
were not.

demo.cairnobs.org is live and is not evidence for Phase 4. It runs
COMPOSE_PROFILES=single-tenant, so it exercises the OSS path and says
nothing about RBAC, tenant isolation or per-tenant ClickHouse. A healthy
demo proving multi-tenancy is exactly the wrong inference to leave
available.

SSO has been tried against one IdP and one local kind cluster, not two
IdPs and not a production-grade cluster.

The Terraform entry now names its cause instead of pointing at another
file: alerting exposes no PUT for rules or targets, and neither
rulestore.Store nor notifystore.Store has an Update method to wire one
to, so Terraform destroys and recreates -- which resets alert_state and
delivery-log continuity.
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Cairn OBS

Open-core, Kubernetes-native log aggregation and observability.
Built to match Splunk on capability while winning on cost-per-GB,
with honest multi-tenant RBAC and a modern language stack.

Licensed AGPLv3 in its entirety — including enterprise/. See Licensing.

What it does

Logs flow from a statically-linked Rust edge agent through Redpanda into a Go ingest pipeline, landing in ClickHouse for analytics and Tantivy for full-text search. One query language spans both stores, compiling to a single execution plan:

service=api | where status>=500 | stats count by host | sort -count
message:"connection refused" | stats count by host

Raw ClickHouse SQL stays available as an escape hatch and compiles to the same IR, so performance doesn't depend on which syntax you write.

On top of that sit dashboards, an alerting evaluator with threshold and absence rules, a CLI (cairnobsctl), a Terraform provider, and AI-assisted query authoring that runs against a self-hosted Ollama model by default — no cloud dependency.

Architecture

Component Stack
Edge agent Rust, musl static target
Transport Redpanda (Kafka API)
Ingest / parse Go
Analytical store ClickHouse
Full-text index Tantivy (Rust)
Control plane / API Go, gRPC + REST gateway
Control-plane metadata PostgreSQL
Frontend SvelteKit + TypeScript
Deployment Kubernetes Operator (kubebuilder), Helm, docker-compose

PostgreSQL is scoped strictly to control-plane config — dashboards, panels, alert rules and state, notification targets, delivery log — because those need row-level locking and transactional read-modify-write that ClickHouse's MergeTree family doesn't provide. Log data itself never touches it.

Full spec: docs/architecture.md. Read it before changing any component; the storage/query split in particular is deliberate.

Repository layout

Monorepo, one top-level directory per component, each with its own README.md, unit tests, and Dockerfile.

agent/      Rust edge agent (Linux + Windows)
transport/  Redpanda topics and schemas
ingest/     Go ingest and parse pipeline
storage/    ClickHouse schema and migrations
search/     Tantivy full-text index service
api/        Control plane, query compiler, RBAC
alerting/   Rule evaluator and notification delivery
metadata/   PostgreSQL schema and migrations
web/        SvelteKit frontend
cli/        cairnobsctl
proto/      gRPC service definitions
terraform/  Terraform provider
enterprise/ SSO, multi-tenancy, per-tenant provisioning
deploy/     Helm charts and Kubernetes operator
docs/       Architecture, design docs, per-phase runbooks
hack/       Development scripts

enterprise/ stays a separate module that core never imports from. Since the Phase 6 relicensing that boundary is architectural rather than legal — it keeps core buildable and deployable standalone, and keeps tenant resolution server-side.

Running locally

docker compose up

The web UI comes up on http://localhost:3000 and the API on :8080; alerting is on :8081 and enterprise auth on :8082. The agent connects to ingest over mTLS gRPC on :4317. search is reachable only on the compose network — it publishes no host port.

COMPOSE_PROFILES in .env selects the query-serving binary — single-tenant (default) or enterprise for the multi-tenant path. They're mutually exclusive, the same choice Helm's enterprise.enabled flag makes for a real cluster. Override per invocation:

COMPOSE_PROFILES=enterprise docker compose up

Kubernetes deployment via the Helm chart in deploy/.

Status

Built in phases; each has a runbook in docs/ recording how it was verified. Full per-phase detail is in docs/status.md.

Phase Scope Status
0 Agent → Redpanda → ingest → ClickHouse, queryable end-to-end Shipped
1 Windows Event Log + journald, SQL and full-text paths Shipped
2 Unified query language across both stores Shipped
3 Dashboards, alert rules, notification delivery Shipped
4 RBAC, tenant isolation, audit logging, per-tenant ClickHouse Shipped
5 Frontend redesign and design system Shipped
6 License compliance audit and remediation Shipped
7 AI-assisted query authoring Shipped

Phase 4 is shipped, and the environment that proved it is gone. Every control the phase defines was verified against real infrastructure at least once — a docker-compose stack with real ClickHouse and Postgres, a local kind cluster, and both SSO protocols against a real Auth0 tenant — finding eight bugs that no amount of Docker-free testing could have caught. The prototype VPS was retired on 2026-09-04, so that verification is a record rather than something you can re-run: see docs/phase-4-runbook.md.

Two limits worth stating plainly. SSO has been tried against one IdP, not two, and no production-grade cluster has run this. And demo.cairnobs.org is not evidence for any of it — the demo runs the single-tenant profile, so it exercises the OSS path and says nothing about RBAC or tenant isolation.

The Windows agent code (EvtSubscribe, ETW, service registration) has never run on real Windows — no Windows toolchain existed in the build environment. ETW additionally sits behind a feature flag, since it needs elevated privileges. Details in agent/README.md.

Terraform provider coverage is partial by necessity: dashboards and panels have full CRUD, while alert rules and notification targets are create/destroy only, because alerting exposes no PUT /rules/{id} or PUT /targets/{id} to update against. Tenant and RBAC resources are disclosed future work — terraform/README.md accounts for exactly what exists.

Contributing

  • Conventional commits. Every change should be a logically complete, independently revertible unit.
  • Rust: cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings must pass.
  • Go: go vet and golangci-lint, no globals for shared state.
  • Every UI action must map to a documented REST/gRPC call — no UI-only logic. The CLI and Terraform provider are first-class, not afterthoughts.
  • Prefer boring, well-understood dependencies. This is infrastructure software; operators need to trust it.

Licensing

Copyright (C) 2026 Coffey Labs.

AGPLv3, no exceptions — see LICENSE. enterprise/ was under a commercial-license stub from Phase 4 through Phase 5; Phase 6 relicensed it to match core. The full record and its business-model consequences are in docs/compliance/license-audit-report.md.

The default AI deployment uses qwen2.5-coder (Apache-2.0) via Ollama, chosen specifically to keep that license purity intact. The cloud adapter is pluggable, opt-in, and off by default.

S
Description
Imported from github.com during the 2026-09-20 standup (local dir: cairnobs)
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