_resolve_incident() only ever fires from process_event() on a
service_healthy/service_recovered event. A service that is removed,
renamed, or was only ever a one-off test never emits that event again,
so its incident stays "active" in world/incidents.json forever — this
is what left 5 incidents wedged on VPS until a manual on-node edit
during the 2026-08-26 recon session (docs/sessions/2026-08-26.md).
Two independent unwedging mechanisms, both in observer._prune_stale_world
(runs every cycle, so no new event is required to trigger either):
(a) Time-based fallback: any active incident with last_occurrence older
than INCIDENT_STALE_RESOLVE_SECS (env, default 24h) auto-resolves
with resolved_reason="auto_stale_no_events_24h". Unlike the existing
orphan case (Case 2, 5-min guard, only unlinked incidents), this
also clears a service's lingering incident_id link — that link is
exactly what a decommissioned service's incident never gets a
chance to clear via the normal event path.
(b) Manual path: an operator touches
world/resolve-requests/<incident-id>; the observer consumes the
flag file each cycle, force-resolves with resolved_reason=
"manual_operator", and always removes the flag (even for an
unknown/already-resolved id) so a mistyped flag can't sit forever
looking unprocessed.
Chose a flag file over adding a mutation endpoint to operator_ui.py:
/action/mutate only knows actions/<status>/<id>.json, there is no
incidents equivalent, and world/incidents.json is exclusively
observer-owned (rewritten wholesale every cycle by _save_world) —
a second writer (the HTTP handler thread) would race the observer's
own writes. A flag file needs no new HTTP surface and reuses the
same "operator drops a file, the owning process consumes it"
pattern the actions pending/approved queue already uses. Smaller
diff, no new attack surface on a server with no auth on writes.
Tests added to test_incident_lifecycle.py: stale-resolve past the
threshold (service still linked), negative case (fresh active incident
stays active), configurable threshold, manual-flag resolve + flag
removal, flag for an unknown incident, flag for an already-resolved
incident. Full control-plane suite: 179 passed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017WDKj5LRY8vdQMx57dfNnu
Per-node checkpoint now stores the last-processed event TIMESTAMP (int epoch)
instead of a file path compared lexically. A file is "new" iff its timestamp
(parsed from evt-<node>-<unixts>-<type>-<svc>.json, mtime fallback) exceeds the
node's checkpoint; processing is ordered by timestamp, not path.
Root cause (PIHA dead ~34d, 2026-07-12): a stray evt-unknown-<ts>-… file landed
in events/piha/, lexically greater than every evt-piha-… name. The lexical
checkpoint pinned there, so every genuinely newer piha event sorted "before" it
and was skipped forever. Event backlog grew to 7344 files, last_seen frozen,
shadow-read logged false SHADOW_LIVENESS_MISMATCH event=dead prom=up.
- _event_ts_from_path: filename epoch, mtime fallback; NEVER returns 0 for an
existing file (0 == "older than checkpoint" == the poison).
- _checkpoint_ts_from_value: graceful migration of pre-fix path-string
checkpoints (and the older last_processed_file format) to int epochs;
unparseable → 0 (reprocess all — safe, process_event is idempotent on
last_seen/world_state; bias to reprocess, never to skip).
- Preserved: quarantine of bad events, observer-source re-ingest guard.
- Regression tests (test_incident_lifecycle.py section 9): lexically-smaller-
but-newer processed, unparseable name falls back to mtime (not wedged),
ts-not-path ordering, both checkpoint-format migrations, helper units.
Separate bug filed in backlog (not fixed here): ha-diag-agent emits node=
"unknown" events (config.py node_name default) into another node's dir when
NODE_NAME reaches the compose volume path but not the app env — the source of
the poison file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The test_run_once_* cases were flaky/order-dependent. Root cause: observer.observer
derives OBSERVER_STATE_FILE from STATE_DIR at import time. The helper patched
STATE_DIR but never OBSERVER_STATE_FILE, so run_once()/_save_checkpoint() wrote the
checkpoint to the real /opt/homelab/state/observer_checkpoint.json. Those node_checkpoints
(tmp paths tagged with a pytest run number) leaked across tests and across pytest runs;
run_once's `file_path > checkpoint` string compare then skipped/kept events based on
run-number ordering. The helper also never restored the module globals it overwrote.
Replace both ad-hoc helpers with an autouse monkeypatch fixture that redirects every
observer path — including OBSERVER_STATE_FILE — into the per-test tmp_path and reverts
them afterward. Tests no longer touch real disk and are deterministic.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fixes the "dead node shown NOMINAL" silent outage: node status was set only by
events and never expired, so a node that crashed/lost connectivity stayed
"online" forever (chelsty-infra was online for 16d, piha ~6d). The only thing
that flipped status to offline was a node_offline event, which an unreachable
node can never emit.
Now node status is derived from freshness (now - last_seen), recomputed every
observer cycle (incl. cycles with no new events):
- always-on: fresh <=180s, stale 180-600s, dead >600s (3x the 60s heartbeat)
- remote/LTE (chelsty-*): fresh <=900s, stale 900-3600s, dead >3600s
Thresholds + tier logic live in ONE shared helper, services/control-plane/src/
liveness.py, imported by the observer and both operator UIs (bind-mounted into
the agent-system webui image). No 3x copy.
Transitions are not silent: the observer emits node_stale / node_offline /
node_online (recovery) events tagged source=observer (skipped on re-ingest so
they never reset last_seen), routed by the supervisor to alert_only actions.
Read-time safety net: both UIs recompute liveness from last_seen at request
time, so a stalled observer still surfaces dead nodes. Services inherit their
node's liveness (cascade, variant B) without mutating services.json.
Replaces the earlier binary NODE_OFFLINE_TTL_SECS flip.
Tests: liveness unit tests, observer 3-state + transitions/recovery/baseline +
self-event skip, operator_ui read-time net + cascade, supervisor node-event
routing. 89 passed. docker compose config valid for both stacks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Nodes that crash or lose connectivity without emitting node_offline
stay online in world state indefinitely. _prune_stale_world() now
flips any online node to offline if its last_seen is older than
NODE_OFFLINE_TTL_SECS (default 300 s = 5× the 60 s heartbeat interval).
Nodes with last_seen=None (never reported) and already-offline nodes
are left unchanged. Five new tests cover all branches.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Recovery from bad merge of task/observer-poison-quarantine (c255a02)
which carried false deletes from a stale branch base. Re-applies only
the genuine observer changes on top of correct master state.
When an event file fails to parse (malformed JSON, truncated, corrupted),
the observer previously kept retrying on every cycle while the node's
checkpoint stayed pinned — all subsequent good events for that node lost.
Now: first parse failure -> atomic os.replace to STATE_DIR/observer_failed_events/<node>/
with collision handling. Checkpoint advances, downstream events flow.
Move failures are logged but don't crash the loop.
Complementary to the atomic_write_json fix on state files; this addresses
the same race-pattern on event files instead.
Regression test asserts: bad event quarantined to failed_events dir,
removed from hot path, subsequent good event processed (node online),
checkpoint moves to good event.
Two root causes for stale "active" incidents on the dashboard:
1. TypeError bug in _prune_stale_world: last_occurrence / resolved_at
can be an ISO-8601 string (stability-agent via events.py) or a Unix
int (node-agent). The previous session's auto-resolve did plain
`time.time() - last_occ` which raises TypeError for strings,
silently preventing _save_world() from being called and leaving
incidents perpetually "active" on disk.
Fix: add _parse_ts(ts) -> float that handles int, float, and
ISO-8601 strings uniformly. All timestamp arithmetic now goes through
it; returns 0.0 on None / garbage to keep comparisons safe.
2. Orphaned active incidents: _resolve_incident clears service["incident_id"]
and marks the incident "resolved" in memory, but if incidents.json was
truncated mid-write (pre-atomic-write era), the observer loaded it at
next startup with status="active" and no service entry pointing to it.
No code ever touched these orphans again.
Fix: _prune_stale_world now runs two cleanup passes each cycle:
- Case 1 (healthy-linked): service.status=="healthy" AND incident_id
still set → resolve immediately (service cannot have active incident)
- Case 2 (orphaned): active incident with no service link AND
last_occurrence > 5 min ago → resolve (5-min guard for creation race)
Both cases are wrapped in try/except so a bug here never crashes the
observer loop or blocks _save_world.
Also fixes the 7-day stale-incident prune to use _parse_ts so
ISO-string resolved_at values are handled correctly.
3. Operator UI: current_incidents() now filters to status=="active" only.
Resolved incidents were previously included in the /incidents endpoint,
making the dashboard show a wall of historical records as if active.
Nocturnal job investigation: _cleanup_control_plane_fs in node-agent runs
every 60s on VPS (not midnight-specific); it reads observer_checkpoint.json
(now written atomically) and deletes old event files. No non-atomic writes
found. Midnight clustering was likely external (logrotate / OS flush);
the supervisor's resilient loader already handles such transient issues.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oskar Kapala