oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/omicron

health check reported hung sagas that aren't actually running

Open
#10,531 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
572
Forks
97
Avg merge
2d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
96

Description

In our dogfood environment, when we first deployed oxidecomputer/console#3226, we noticed the "contact support" bit was set. The reason was a bunch of sagas that have been running for a long time. Investigation of one of these sagas revealed a case we didn't consider with the health checks: a saga that (1) has not finished (it's still unwinding), but (2) is not running and can never be running in Nexus again (because a steno bug is preventing it from being recovered).

Questions here include:

  1. Should Nexus handoff during update block on such sagas (i.e., not proceed while there are sagas that couldn't be recovered)? I'm thinking "no" because these aren't running and won't be running on the other side of the update, either. But it's definitely a dicey situation.
  2. If not, should the health check still identify these? I'm inclined to say "no" because although they are a problem, they're not related to update (again, assuming we decide handoff should continue ignoring these).
  3. What do we do to repair a system in this situation? (This question is not update-related.)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing Nexus health checks and update handoff behavior for unfinished sagas, then review how steno recovery determines whether a saga can run again. Clarify whether unrecoverable, non-running sagas should block handoff or appear in health checks, and define the repair path. Done means these questions have an agreed behavior and corresponding implementation scope.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
backend, distributed-systems, observability
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.