Report why a unit failed in its Slack alert - #36
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`OnFailure=` only told the alert which unit failed. For the health check that is the least useful half of the story: every critical check exits 1, so a page read "orbit-data-check.service failed" whether the volume had filled up or CelesTrak had started refusing requests, and the actual cause stayed on the host until someone SSH'd in. The alert unit now passes systemd's own verdict ($MONITOR_SERVICE_RESULT and $MONITOR_EXIT_STATUS, which separate a critical check from an OOM kill or a timeout) and the journal of the invocation that failed. `alert-slack` reduces that journal to the records that explain the failure: error-level records first, unstructured output when the container never got far enough to log one, warnings only when nothing failed outright. The excerpt is scoped by _SYSTEMD_INVOCATION_ID rather than by unit, so the previous healthy run cannot leak into it, and it travels as a command argument because stdin belongs to the webhook credential. Everything in the capture path is tolerant of failure: a manager without $MONITOR_* or an unreadable journal costs detail, never the alert. The unit's command line is now exercised directly in the deployment tests, with podman and journalctl faked, because nothing else runs that shell line -- systemd specifiers, backticks, and a redirect -- until something has already gone wrong at 04:00. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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WalkthroughThe change adds systemd failure results, exit statuses, and reduced journal causes to Slack alerts. The CLI accepts these values, the systemd unit supplies them, and tests and deployment documentation cover parsing, rendering, delivery, and independent image and unit upgrades. ChangesAlert cause reporting
Estimated code review effort: 4 (Complex) | ~45 minutes Merge Risk: 🔵 Low · up to The change adds failed-invocation details to Slack alerts, improving diagnosis, but generic structured log fields could expose sensitive values if producers log them. The PR is mergeable with explicit owner awareness and follow-up to define safe fields or redaction, along with fixing the localized Markdown lint issue. Sequence Diagram(s)sequenceDiagram
participant SystemdAlertUnit
participant journalctl
participant AlertSlack
participant SlackWebhook
SystemdAlertUnit->>journalctl: Read the failed invocation journal
journalctl-->>SystemdAlertUnit: Return an excerpt or a read failure
SystemdAlertUnit->>AlertSlack: Pass result, exit status, and cause
AlertSlack->>SlackWebhook: Send the rendered alert
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🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1❌ Failed checks (1 warning)
✅ Passed checks (4 passed)
Full details: Docstring CoverageExplanation Docstring coverage is 39.39% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 33 functions across 5 files. (2 skipped: 2 unsupported.) ✨ Finishing Touches 💡 1📝 Generate docstrings 💡
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| warnings.append(rendered) | ||
| else: | ||
| routine.append(rendered) | ||
| selected = failures or unstructured or warnings or routine |
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In the checked sync-gp flow, a mid-stream BudgetExceededError increments failed but is deliberately logged only at warning level (src/orbit_data/gp.py:217-226), causing the CLI to exit 1. Whenever Pull=newer has also written Podman's ordinary unstructured progress lines into that invocation, this ordering selects those lines and discards the warning that actually explains the failure, so Slack reports image-pull noise as the cause; warnings should take precedence over the unstructured fallback when no error record exists.
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Actionable comments posted: 1
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Inline comments:
In `@deploy/README.md`:
- Line 246: Update the code fence at line 246 in the deploy README to specify
the text language by changing the opening fence to ```text, resolving
markdownlint MD040 without altering the block contents.
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deploy/README.mddeploy/systemd/orbit-data-alert@.servicesrc/orbit_data/alerts.pysrc/orbit_data/cli.pytests/test_alerts.pytests/test_cli.pytests/test_deployment.py
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CodeQL read `"hooks.slack.com" in value` as an incomplete URL host check (py/incomplete-url-substring-sanitization, high). The assertion is the opposite of sanitization -- it proves the credential is absent from the command line -- but podman is faked in this test, so the value never has to look like a webhook at all. A sentinel says what the assertion means and leaves no hostname substring to misread. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A GP dataset cut off at the daily byte budget counts as failed, so the unit exits non-zero, but it is logged at warning level (gp.py:217). On a `Pull=newer` start that also wrote pull progress into the same invocation, the previous ordering picked those progress lines and reported image-pull noise as the cause, hiding the warning that actually explained the failure. Raised in review on #36. Warnings now outrank unstructured output, and unstructured output is read by position instead: before the application's first record it is podman's preamble -- routine progress, or, when the pull never reached GHCR, the only thing left to report -- and after it, the application has stopped logging through its own logger, so a traceback or a runtime kill is treated like an error record rather than ranked below a stale warning. Also gives the sample block in the deployment notes a language (MD040). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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What changed
OnFailure=alerts named the unit that failed and nothing else. Fororbit-data-check.servicethat is the least useful half of the story: everycritical health check exits 1, so a page read the same way whether the volume
had filled up or CelesTrak had started refusing requests, and the actual cause
stayed on the host until someone SSH'd in.
orbit-data-alert@.servicenow passes two things it did not before:$MONITOR_SERVICE_RESULTand$MONITOR_EXIT_STATUS(v251+), which separate a critical check from anout-of-memory kill or a timeout, rendered as
Result: `exit-code (status 1)`.alert-slackreduces tothe records that explain it.
A delivered alert now looks like:
summarize_journalprefers error-level records; it falls back to unstructuredoutput for the case where the container never got far enough to log one (an
unreachable GHCR leaves only podman's message, and that message is the whole
story), and reports warnings only when nothing failed outright. Unstructured
output is deliberately not preferred over the structured records, because
Pull=newerwrites progress lines to the same journal on every successful run.Notes for review
_SYSTEMD_INVOCATION_ID, not by--unit, so lines from theprevious healthy run cannot leak into the excerpt. Mixing
-uwith a fieldmatch would OR them rather than AND them.
$(…)in the unit: systemd expands$in command linesitself, so the
${MONITOR_*}references resolve at whichever layer reachesthem first, while command substitution has to arrive at
/bin/shuntouched.webhook credential. It is the service's own log output — anything genuinely
secret must not be logged in the first place — but it does mean journal text
becomes visible in
ps, a slight widening over journal read access. Flaggedin the unit comment; easy to tighten if that trade is unwelcome.
$MONITOR_*(systemd <251, or a hand-run
systemctl start orbit-data-alert@…) or an unreadablejournal costs detail, never the alert.
podmanandjournalctlfaked, in both the full and the degraded state. Nothing elseruns that shell line — specifiers, backticks, redirect — until something has
already gone wrong at 04:00, so the quoting cannot silently rot.
deploy/README.md: the unit passesarguments only a build carrying this change understands, and
--pull=nevermeans installing units ahead of the image leaves
orbit-data-alert@…failingvisibly (with the original failure still in its own journal) until the next
Pull=newerstart refreshes it.Verification
pytest(238 passed, 94% coverage),ruff check,ruff format --check,mypy --strict,pylint(10.00), andbanditall pass on top of currentmain.🤖 Generated with Claude Code
Summary by CodeRabbit
New Features
Bug Fixes