The estate could show an operator their infrastructure and had nothing to
say to the business paying for it. Two storefronts and the gateway behind
both fix that: Magento on two hosts, WooCommerce on one, and pay-01
carrying authorisations with amount, gateway and decline reason. Orders,
revenue, average order value, where checkout loses people and why a card
was refused now come out of the same log lines the operators are already
reading, which is the argument for not running a separate metrics stack
beside this one.
Two platforms rather than one deliberately. Magento and WooCommerce write
about the same events differently, so a panel that groups by service
instead of assuming a single shape is the honest way to build one -- and
the demo shows that rather than describing it.
Order totals are built from a basket of real SKUs at real prices rather
than drawn from a distribution, so average order value moves the way one
actually moves. Declines rise during the seeded outage window alongside
the 5xx rate, because whatever fails requests fails authorisations too.
Twenty-seven new alert rules, thresholds calibrated against what the
fleet actually emits -- measured on the demo's own week of history rather
than guessed. A rule set at the average fires constantly and one set an
order of magnitude above it never fires; these sit two to three times the
steady-state rate, so they are quiet in normal operation and true during
the diurnal peak or the seeded incident. Four are absence rules, because
a domain controller or a storefront going silent is not a threshold
question.
Six new dashboards: fleet health, golden signals, security posture,
capacity and storage, commerce, payments.
Three limits of the query language found the hard way and worth writing
down, because each was discovered by a panel failing rather than by
reading: `dc()` does not exist -- the functions are count, sum, avg, min
and max; `or` is not supported between structured filters, so a panel
spanning tiers filters on the attribute they share and groups by service;
and dashboards refuse raw SQL outright. The validator run over all 169
panels and 38 rules now checks every one of those, plus stages, viz types
and comparators.
The demo had 75k generic records across eight host-0N/service pairs, one
dashboard, one alert rule, and -- because nothing ever called
AgentControl.CheckIn -- a completely empty Agents page.
/hack/demo-simulator replaces the generic data with a fictional but
coherent fleet: 14 hosts running nginx, an API tier, workers, Postgres,
Redis, mail, Linux journals and Windows event logs, whose messages and
attributes look like what those services actually write. It backfills a
week (~370k records, ~20s) and then keeps running.
Running continuously is the point, not an implementation detail. Three
things the demo has to show are only true if data keeps arriving: the
Agents page marks a host stale once check-ins stop, alert rules evaluate
over trailing windows and would freeze in one state against a static
dataset, and any "last 15 minutes" view is empty on data that stopped
growing overnight. It also emits metrics/heartbeats and answers CheckIn
faithfully enough that the remote-config editor's pending -> applied
transition works end to end.
Seeded incidents give the data something to find: an api-02 outage with
matching slow queries on db-01, 5xx at the edge and cascading job
failures; an SSH probe burst; a spam wave; a disk filling up; and one
decommissioned host left deliberately stale.
/hack/demo-seed holds the rest of the deployment -- the nightly reset,
eight dashboards (64 panels, every viz type but line), eleven alert
rules across three notification targets, and the systemd unit. Rule
thresholds are calibrated against what the simulator actually produces:
the first pass had four rules whose thresholds the traffic could never
reach and one that fired during normal operation.
No line charts: dashboard panels reject the raw-SQL escape hatch, and
the pipe language has no time-bucketing, so a real time axis isn't
expressible today. Noted in demo-seed/README.md rather than papered
over.
jcoffey-dev