cloudnative-pg / cloudnative-pg/plugin-barman-cloud

Sidecar metrics collection over plugin gRPC has no deadline — one stuck operation hangs the whole instance /metrics

Open
#1,045 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
bug
Dominant language
Go
Stars
191
Forks
72
Avg merge
2d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
21

Description

## Environment

CloudNativePG 1.30.0, plugin-barman-cloud v0.14.0, PostgreSQL 17/18 clusters, VersityGW (posix) S3 endpoint.

## What happens

The instance sidecar collects plugin metrics over the plugin gRPC with **no deadline on the collect path**. Consequence: if any plugin operation gets stuck (in my case a retention/catalog-maintenance run that never completes against a posix-backend S3 gateway — filed separately), the next scrape blocks on the collector and the **entire** `/metrics` endpoint of that instance hangs indefinitely. Prometheus marks the target down and every metric of that instance disappears, not just the plugin's own collectors.

Observed in production: the primary instance's exporter dark for 6.7 hours while the database itself was healthy — WAL-archiver and backup-staleness alerting was blind precisely on the instance where it matters.

## Expected

- A per-collect deadline (a few seconds) on the plugin metrics gRPC call.
- On timeout/error: return the rest of the metrics plus an error counter (e.g. `..._collector_errors_total`), instead of hanging the whole endpoint. A misbehaving plugin should degrade its own metrics, never the instance's.

## Reproduction sketch

1. ObjectStore against VersityGW (posix backend) with any `retentionPolicy` set.
2. Wait for a retention run to start (~30 min cadence) — it never completes against this backend.
3. Scrape the instance sidecar's metrics port: the request hangs until the client gives up; `up` goes to 0 for the instance.

Companion issue describes the retention hang itself; this one is about the missing deadline that turns any such hang into a full metrics outage.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Trace the instance sidecar's plugin gRPC metrics collect path and reproduce the issue with a stuck plugin operation, then inspect how the /metrics endpoint handles collector errors. Verify that a per-collect timeout lets the endpoint return the remaining metrics and records an error when the plugin call stalls, while healthy plugin metrics continue to work.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go, grpc
Domain
backend, observability
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
55/100

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