Files
cairnobs/CLAUDE.md
T
jcoffey-dev 1d57e697b1 Phase 4: real per-tenant ClickHouse isolation via a new enterprise-api binary
Closes the threat model's headline finding for the SQL query path:
enterprise/internal/tenantprovision does real CREATE DATABASE/USER/GRANT
against ClickHouse, and enterprise/internal/chrunner is a per-tenant
connection registry implementing api's SQLRunner interface, resolving
the tenant from the authenticated request identity -- never a
caller-suppliable parameter. Both are wired into a new binary,
enterprise/cmd/enterprise-api, alongside the unchanged single-tenant
api/cmd/api, since AGPL core can never import enterprise/ and Go's own
internal/ package visibility rules meant enterprise/ couldn't implement
core's SQLRunner interface without importing the package that defines
it. That required moving api/internal/{authz,queryapi,dashboards,
querylang/executor,searchclient,httpserver} out of internal/ -- the
minimal set enterprise-api needs to import; querylang's compiler
internals (planner/lexer/parser/ast/ir) and api's own config stay
internal, since nothing outside api needs them directly.

Also finally wires enterprise/internal/audit into queryapi.AuditLogger
(nil since Phase 4 task 4) via a new adapter, and adds live-ClickHouse
integration tests for two of the four adversarial probes named in
docs/phase-4-isolation-design.md's verification plan.

Corrected several overclaims in the docs while writing this up: an
earlier claim that rbacstore's CRUD was "verified against a live
Postgres" was never actually true in this environment (only
internal/audit was, earlier in this phase, before Docker access was
lost) -- threat-model.md, phase-4-runbook.md, CLAUDE.md, and
enterprise/README.md all now distinguish "a real integration test
exists" from "this was confirmed against a live database."

Still not built: Tantivy/free-text tenant isolation
(enterprise/internal/searchclient), and any deployment-topology
mechanism that actually routes traffic to enterprise-api instead of
plain api -- both binaries exist side by side today with nothing
enforcing or flagging which one a deployment runs.
2026-08-13 22:48:38 -07:00

220 lines
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Markdown

# Project: Sentry — Distributed Log Aggregation & Observability Platform
## Mission
Build an open-core, Kubernetes-native centralized logging platform that rivals
Splunk on features but wins on cost-per-GB, modern language stack, and honest
multi-tenant RBAC. Full architecture spec is in `/docs/architecture.md` — read
it before touching any component. Do not deviate from the storage/query split
described there without flagging it to me first.
## Non-negotiable constraints
- Distro-agnostic Linux agent: must run identically on RHEL/Debian/Arch/SUSE
derivatives via a statically-linked musl binary. No glibc runtime deps.
- Windows support via native ETW/Event Log API, not a WSL shim.
- AGPLv3 for core + agents. Enterprise module (SSO/multi-tenancy/compliance)
lives in a separate `enterprise/` directory under a commercial license stub
— keep the boundary clean from day one, don't let AGPL code import from it.
- Schema-on-write with OTel semantic conventions as the default schema, with
schema-on-read fallback for unstructured text.
- Every UI action must correspond to a documented REST/gRPC call. No
UI-only logic. CLI (`sentryctl`) and Terraform provider are first-class,
not afterthoughts.
## Tech stack (pinned — do not substitute without discussion)
| Component | Language/Tool |
|-------------------|------------------------|
| Edge agent | Rust, musl target |
| Transport | Redpanda (Kafka API) |
| Ingest/parse | Go |
| Analytical store | ClickHouse |
| Full-text index | Tantivy (Rust) |
| Control plane/API | Go, gRPC + REST gateway |
| Frontend | SvelteKit + TypeScript |
| Deployment | Kubernetes Operator (Go, kubebuilder), Helm, docker-compose for local/homelab |
## Repo conventions
- Monorepo, one top-level dir per component (see structure below).
- Rust: workspace-based, `cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings` must pass.
- Go: standard `go vet` + `golangci-lint`, no globals for shared state.
- Every component ships with: unit tests, a `README.md`, and a Dockerfile
using distroless or scratch base images where feasible.
- Conventional commits. Every PR-sized change should be a logically complete,
independently revertible unit.
- Prefer boring, well-understood dependencies over novel ones. This is
infrastructure software; operators need to trust it.
## What "done" looks like for Phase 0 (MVP)
**Status: shipped.** A single log line, generated on a Linux host by the
Rust agent, flows: agent → Redpanda → Go ingest service → ClickHouse, and
is queryable via a minimal SQL endpoint and visible in a bare-bones
SvelteKit table view. Verified end-to-end on real hardware, not just in
CI — see `/docs/phase-0-runbook.md`. No alerting, no multi-tenancy, no
dashboards — that discipline held for the whole phase.
## What "done" looks like for Phase 1
**Status: shipped.** A Windows Event Log entry and a Linux journald entry
are both queryable via SQL (the ClickHouse path) and via free-text search
(the Tantivy path), from the same UI, within a few seconds of being
generated. Verified end-to-end on the live stack, including the same
`record_id` coming back from both query paths for the same record — see
`/docs/phase-1-runbook.md`.
ETW and WEF (Windows Event Forwarding) were *designed* in this phase but
not required to be running for "done": ETW ships behind a feature flag
most environments won't enable (it needs elevated privileges), and WEF's
receiver-side was explicitly deferred rather than built. Only the Event
Log source needed to actually be running end-to-end, and did. The
Windows-specific agent code itself (`EvtSubscribe`, ETW, service
registration) remains unverified on real Windows — no Windows toolchain
existed anywhere in the environment this was built in; flagged
prominently in `/agent/README.md` and the runbook.
## What "done" looks like for Phase 2
A single query bar in the web UI and a single `sentryctl query` command
can express filter + free-text + stats in one query (e.g. `service=api |
where status>=500 | stats count by host | sort -count`, or
`message:"connection refused" | stats count by host`), execute correctly
against both ClickHouse and Tantivy in one compiled plan, and return in
well under a second for a 1M-row fixture dataset (rough benchmark, not a
formal SLA — see `/docs/phase-2-runbook.md` for the actual measurement).
Raw ClickHouse SQL remains available as an escape hatch, compiling to the
same execution plan/IR as the pipe syntax so performance doesn't depend
on which syntax a query uses.
Non-goals for this phase (same "resist scope creep" discipline as every
phase so far): no alerting, no dashboards, no multi-tenancy — this phase
is the query layer only. The two separate placeholder pages/endpoints
from Phase 0/1 (`/query` raw-SQL-only, `/search` free-text-only) are
retired, replaced by one `/query` endpoint and one query page.
See `/docs/query-language-design.md` for the grammar, IR, and
ClickHouse/Tantivy routing strategy, and
`/docs/query-language-reference.md` for the user-facing syntax reference
once built.
## What "done" looks like for Phase 3
**Status: shipped.** A user can build a multi-panel dashboard from saved Phase 2 queries (at
least a line chart panel and a table panel, working end-to-end against
live data), save an alert rule that fires a Slack webhook when a
condition is met (threshold comparison, or "absence" — the query returned
zero rows in its own time window), and see the delivery attempt logged —
all from the web UI, without touching the API directly. See
`/docs/phase-3-dashboard-design.md` and `/docs/phase-3-alerting-design.md`
for the data models and the alerting evaluator's firing/resolved state
machine, and `/docs/phase-3-runbook.md` for the live-stack verification,
including a load test of the alert evaluator against ~500 concurrent
rules.
This phase adds PostgreSQL as a new pinned-stack component (see the
dashboard design doc for why ClickHouse can't do this job — dashboards
and alert state need real row-level locking and transactional
read-modify-write, which ClickHouse's MergeTree family doesn't provide),
scoped strictly to control-plane config: dashboards, panels, notification
targets, alert rules, alert state, delivery log. Log data itself stays on
ClickHouse/Tantivy only, unchanged.
Non-goals for this phase (same discipline as every phase so far):
- No multi-tenancy enforcement and no `enterprise/` module work — single
tenant/org assumed. Most new tables (`dashboards`, `alert_rules`,
`notification_targets`) carry a `tenant_id` column so part of Phase 4's
retrofit doesn't require a migration + backfill — but `alert_state` and
`delivery_log` do not (an inconsistency found during Phase 4 planning,
not caught at the time); Phase 4 adds `tenant_id` to those two and
backfills via a join through `alert_rules.id`, and — per
`/docs/phase-4-isolation-design.md` — tenant isolation itself turned
out to live at the ClickHouse/Tantivy connection layer, not via these
columns at all, since Phase 2's raw-SQL escape hatch can never be
covered by a row filter regardless of which tables carry one.
- No raw-SQL dashboard panels (time-range injection isn't reliable
against arbitrary SQL) — pipe-syntax queries only.
- No per-group/multi-row threshold alerting (e.g. "alert separately per
host") — a threshold rule's query must resolve to a single row.
- No debounce on the way down — a firing alert resolves on the first
false evaluation, no symmetric "stay firing for N more minutes" hold.
- No Kubernetes Operator/Helm deployment work — still docker-compose,
`/deploy` remains stubbed.
## What "done" looks like for Phase 4
**Status: in progress, not shipped.** RBAC enforcement (`api/authz`), the
`alerting``api` service-identity credential, tenant-scoped dashboards,
append-only audit logging, and — since the second pass on this phase —
real per-tenant ClickHouse provisioning and query routing
(`enterprise/internal/tenantprovision`, `enterprise/internal/chrunner`,
wired into a new `enterprise/cmd/enterprise-api` binary alongside plain
`api/cmd/api`) are all built and tested — real integration tests exist
for the ClickHouse pieces, but this environment lost Docker/database
access partway through the phase, so only the audit-logging guarantees
were actually confirmed against a live database; the rest is untested
beyond "compiles, and skips cleanly when no live database is
configured" (see `/docs/phase-4-runbook.md`'s verification-status
section). Two things still keep this phase from being done: SSO login
(OIDC/SAML protocol wiring exists, no
HTTP login handler calls it), and Tantivy/free-text queries have no
per-tenant index routing at all (`enterprise-api` closes the ClickHouse
half of tenant isolation, not the Tantivy half) — plus a deployment gap
worth naming explicitly: nothing yet forces or even flags whether a
given deployment is actually running the isolated binary
(`enterprise-api`) versus the plain single-tenant one (`api`); both
still exist and nothing currently prevents mixing them up. Full
accounting: `/docs/security/threat-model.md`; step-by-step verification
procedure (not yet run against a live cluster in this environment):
`/docs/phase-4-runbook.md`. The rest of this section describes the exit
bar this phase is aiming at, not a completed state.
Two tenants can be provisioned with SSO (OIDC or SAML), each with their
own users, roles, dashboards, and alert rules, fully isolated at the
ClickHouse/Tantivy connection layer — not by a row filter — with
adversarial integration tests proving no cross-tenant data leakage,
including via the raw-SQL escape hatch and ClickHouse's own `system.*`
tables. A tenant admin can see a query audit trail for their tenant,
backed by append-only storage a compromised application credential
cannot alter (enforced by database grants, not just convention) and
periodically anchored outside the database so tampering is detectable
even against a privileged attacker. See `/docs/phase-4-isolation-design.md`
for the tenant isolation model and why it lives at the connection layer,
`/docs/phase-4-rbac-design.md` for the role/permission model, and
`/docs/security/threat-model.md` for the auth flows and audit-log
integrity guarantees, written for a prospective enterprise customer's
security team.
The tenant-isolation, provisioning, SSO, and RBAC-enforcement mechanisms
live entirely in `enterprise/` (commercial license), confirmed
explicitly rather than assumed: AGPL core (`/api`, `/alerting`, `/web`)
stays genuinely single-tenant, with no multi-tenant mechanism present at
all — `enterprise/` supplies tenant-scoped implementations of core's
already-shipped `querylang/executor.SQLRunner`/`SearchClient` interfaces
rather than core growing tenant awareness. Query-compiler-level "compile
time" enforcement, as originally proposed, turned out not to be
achievable in any module once Phase 2's opaque raw-SQL passthrough is
accounted for — the honest, implemented guarantee is that every code
path (compiled query or raw SQL) is forced through a tenant-scoped
database connection/index that the database's own access control
enforces, not a compiler-injected filter.
Non-goals for this phase (same discipline as every phase so far):
- No deny-override permissions — per-resource grants (e.g. a specific
user getting edit access to one dashboard) are additive only; a full
allow/deny ACL system is future work.
- No data retention/deletion policy design for tenant deprovisioning —
the provisioning state machine includes a `deprovisioning` state, but
what actually happens to a deprovisioned tenant's data is a separate,
not-yet-designed compliance question.
- No general multi-cluster orchestration in `/deploy` — scoped to
proving the per-tenant ClickHouse/Tantivy isolation model works, not a
fully general multi-cluster system.
- No protection against a privileged ClickHouse/Postgres administrator —
the isolation and audit-log guarantees in this phase are structural
defenses against application-layer bugs and injection, not against
someone with database superuser access; that's an operational control,
out of scope here and named explicitly, not silently assumed away.
## When in doubt
Ask before: changing the pinned stack, adding a new external dependency
that pulls in a large transitive tree, or making an architectural decision
that isn't already specified in `/docs/architecture.md`.