# 15 — Observability

## Summary

We have minimal observability today: `kubectl logs`, `kubectl top`,
Cloudflare Analytics, and the Neon dashboard. No Prometheus, no Grafana,
no centralized log aggregator, no APM. This is adequate for the
current traffic volume (low) but is a known gap. This chapter documents
what we *have* and what we'd add as traffic grows.

## What we have

### 1. `kubectl logs`

Every container's stdout/stderr is captured by containerd and readable
via kubectl:

```bash
# Live tail from all api pods
kubectl logs -n honeydue -l app.kubernetes.io/name=api -f --prefix

# Last 100 lines
kubectl logs -n honeydue -l app.kubernetes.io/name=api --tail=100

# Previous pod's logs (before the most recent restart)
kubectl logs -n honeydue <pod-name> --previous

# Events (not logs — k8s-level state changes)
kubectl get events -n honeydue --sort-by=.lastTimestamp
```

**Retention**: containerd rotates logs when they exceed 10 MB (default).
Only the last ~20 MB of logs is retained per container, on-disk on the
node. Once a pod is deleted, its logs are gone.

For persistent log access we'd need aggregation (see §what we'd add).

### 2. `kubectl top`

Pod and node resource usage via metrics-server:

```bash
kubectl top nodes
# NAME                CPU(cores)   CPU(%)   MEMORY(bytes)   MEMORY(%)
# ubuntu-8gb-nbg1-1   169m         4%       748Mi           9%
# ubuntu-8gb-nbg1-2   229m         5%       1043Mi          13%
# ubuntu-8gb-nbg1-3   124m         3%       770Mi           9%

kubectl top pods -n honeydue
```

**Retention**: In-memory only. Last few minutes of data. No
historical view.

### 3. Cloudflare Analytics

CF Dashboard → Analytics & Logs. Per-zone stats:
- Requests per second
- Bandwidth
- Cache hit ratio
- Top HTTP status codes
- Top request paths
- Bot traffic score

All aggregated, no individual request traces. Good for spotting macro
trends ("suddenly 10× more 502s today"), poor for debugging specific
issues.

Free tier retention: 7 days of aggregate stats. Pro extends this.

### 4. Neon dashboard

Neon console → project → Monitoring:
- Compute utilization (CU-hours consumed)
- Query performance (slow queries)
- Active connections
- Storage usage

Good for "is the DB busy?" and "am I close to my free tier limit?"
Not real-time.

### 5. Kubernetes events

`kubectl get events` shows cluster-level state changes: pod scheduling,
failures, image pulls, probe failures. Useful for post-mortem on
deploys.

Retention: events are stored in etcd but default to 1 hour.

## What we don't have (the gap)

### No log aggregation

Individual pod logs are on the node. For multi-pod debugging ("show me
all api pod logs for user X") we have to:

```bash
# Query all at once with stern (if installed)
stern -n honeydue api

# Or for specific pod
kubectl logs -n honeydue <pod> | grep user_id=12345
```

This works but doesn't scale. Grep across 3 pods for a specific
user_id is OK. Across 30 pods, intractable.

**What we'd add**: [Loki](https://grafana.com/oss/loki/) — a lightweight
log aggregator designed for k8s. ~$0 to self-host; integrates with
Grafana for queries. Or [Betterstack](https://betterstack.com/logs)
($10/mo, hosted).

### No metrics/dashboards

`kubectl top` tells us "is this pod hot right now?" but not "has CPU
been climbing over the past hour?" We'd need:

- **Prometheus** — scrapes metrics from kubelet and pods' `/metrics`
  endpoints, stores time series
- **Grafana** — queries Prometheus, renders dashboards

K3s can install these via Helm in ~10 minutes. Adds ~500MB RAM to the
cluster. Stability and operational load: moderate.

**Alternative**: [Kubernetes Dashboard](https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard)
bundled with k3s (disabled by default). Minimal UI over the existing
metrics API. Cheaper than Prometheus but less queryable.

### No distributed tracing

"This request took 800ms — which hop was slow?" is currently unanswerable
beyond "the DB query, probably." A real trace would show:
- TLS handshake time
- Traefik routing time
- Go handler time
- Postgres query time
- Redis call time
- Each B2 request time

We'd add OpenTelemetry to the Go app and export to Jaeger/Tempo. Work
is moderate; value kicks in when we have complex request flows.

### No alerting

No PagerDuty, no Slack webhooks, no email on "api is returning 500s."
The operator finds out when users complain.

Cheapest fix: [Uptime Kuma](https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma)
(self-hosted) or Better Stack Uptime (free for small teams). Ping
`https://api.myhoneydue.com/api/health/` every minute; alert if it fails.

### No APM (Application Performance Monitoring)

No request-level profiling. We can't see "which endpoint has the highest
p99 latency?" or "which SQL query is hot this week?"

Options: Datadog, New Relic, Honeycomb, self-hosted Tempo+Grafana.
All are meaningful work to set up and cost $$$.

## The app's logging conventions

The Go app uses zerolog and emits structured JSON:

```json
{
  "level": "info",
  "time": "2026-04-24T05:29:40Z",
  "caller": "/app/cmd/api/main.go:189",
  "addr": ":8000",
  "message": "HTTP server listening"
}
```

Log levels: `debug`, `info`, `warn`, `error`, `fatal`. Controlled by
`DEBUG=true|false` in ConfigMap (true sets level to debug, false sets
level to info).

Every request is logged with:
- Method, path, status code
- Request ID (for correlating logs across pods)
- User ID (if authenticated)
- Latency

```json
{
  "level": "info",
  "method": "GET",
  "path": "/api/tasks/",
  "status": 200,
  "latency_ms": 42,
  "user_id": 123,
  "request_id": "a6b5db35-..."
}
```

This is queryable by grep. Better with log aggregation.

## Health endpoints

Each service exposes a health endpoint:

| Service | Endpoint | What it checks |
|---|---|---|
| api | `/api/health/` | Process alive (doesn't verify DB) |
| admin | `/` | Next.js is up |
| worker | (none public) | Internal Asynq status |

Health endpoints are **shallow** — they return 200 if the process is
running and listening. They don't try to reach Postgres/Redis/etc.
Rationale: if Postgres is briefly down, we don't want all api pods to
start failing liveness and cascade-restart.

## Dozzle (deprecated)

The Swarm era had [Dozzle](https://github.com/amir20/dozzle) — a
lightweight web UI for Docker logs. Accessible via SSH tunnel to the
manager node. Not deployed on k3s; `kubectl logs` + `stern` fills the
niche.

## Kubernetes metrics the k8s API exposes

Even without Prometheus, these are queryable:

```bash
# Resource metrics (via metrics-server)
kubectl get --raw /apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/nodes
kubectl get --raw /apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/honeydue/pods

# Core API (k8s state)
kubectl get --raw /api/v1/namespaces/honeydue/pods/<name>

# Kubelet metrics (per-node; requires tunneling)
kubectl get --raw /api/v1/nodes/<node>/proxy/metrics
```

If we ever spin up Prometheus, these are the endpoints it would scrape.

## Future: what to add and when

| Trigger | Add |
|---|---|
| 10k+ daily users | Loki + Grafana for logs |
| 100+ req/s sustained | Prometheus + Grafana for metrics |
| Performance incidents | OpenTelemetry tracing |
| Revenue > $5k/mo | Paid monitoring (Datadog or similar) |
| First production outage | Alerting to phone/Slack |

The overall philosophy: observability is an investment that compounds.
Add it before you need it, not after. But also don't over-invest at
idle.

**Next quarter**: set up Uptime Kuma + Loki at minimum.

## Checking what's installed

```bash
# In kube-system namespace
kubectl get pods -n kube-system
# Should see: coredns, metrics-server, traefik, local-path-provisioner,
# and some k3s-related helm install jobs

# In honeydue namespace
kubectl get pods -n honeydue
# api, admin, worker, redis

# No monitoring namespace (yet)
kubectl get namespaces
# default, honeydue, kube-node-lease, kube-public, kube-system
```

## Operator cheat sheet

```bash
# Tail all logs in the namespace
kubectl logs -n honeydue --all-containers=true --tail=50 -l app.kubernetes.io/part-of=honeydue

# With stern (if installed: brew install stern)
stern -n honeydue .

# Follow specific pod, including previous runs
kubectl logs -n honeydue <pod> -f --previous=false

# Pod resource usage
kubectl top pods -n honeydue --sort-by=memory
kubectl top pods -n honeydue --sort-by=cpu

# Events (cluster-wide)
kubectl get events -A --sort-by=.lastTimestamp | tail -20

# Full state dump for a pod (debugging)
kubectl describe pod -n honeydue <pod> > /tmp/pod-dump.txt
kubectl logs -n honeydue <pod> > /tmp/pod-logs.txt
```

## References

- [Kubernetes metrics-server][ms]
- [K3s metrics][k3s-metrics]
- [Loki][loki]
- [Stern (multi-pod log tail)][stern]

[ms]: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server
[k3s-metrics]: https://docs.k3s.io/advanced#enabling-metrics-server
[loki]: https://grafana.com/oss/loki/
[stern]: https://github.com/stern/stern
