jcoffey-dev
5db3083696
reset-demo.sh carried EVALUATOR_PASSWORD as a literal, which put a working service-account password in the repository. Anyone who could read the source could log in as alerting-evaluator against the live demo and mint an ALERTING_SERVICE_TOKEN whenever they liked -- so rotating the token was theatre while the password that mints it stayed published. Nothing needed it to be a constant. The account exists only to mint that token a few lines later, and `docker compose down -v` earlier in the same script has already destroyed the previous account, so the value never outlives a single reset. Generated per run instead. DEMO_PASSWORD directly above is deliberately left alone: it is a public demo credential, prefilled on the login page and baked into the web bundle at build time from the demo host's compose override. Randomising it would break the demo's own login form, and it protects nothing.
demo-seed
Everything the public demo deployment (demo.cairnobs.org) is built out
of, kept in the repo rather than only on the box so a demo can be rebuilt
from scratch and so its dashboards and rules are reviewable like any
other code.
reset-demo.sh— the nightly reset. Wipes every volume, brings the stack back up, re-seeds users, notification targets, a week of synthetic history, dashboards, and alert rules. Run from cron at 04:00 on the demo host.dashboards/*.json— one file per dashboard, in the shapePOST /dashboards/importconsumes (identical to whatGET /dashboards/{id}/exportand the web UI's Export JSON button produce, so a dashboard edited in the UI can be exported straight back into this directory).alerts/*.json.template— one file per alert rule, in the shapePOST /rulesconsumes.__TARGET_OPS__/__TARGET_SECURITY__/__TARGET_PLATFORM__are substituted at apply time with the IDs of the three notification targetsreset-demo.shcreates: every reset starts from an empty database, so the IDs can't be baked in.cairnobs-demo-simulator.service— systemd unit for the live half of the demo,/hack/demo-simulator. Installed at/etc/systemd/system/on the demo box.
Prefilled login
The demo's login page comes up with the read-only demo account already
in both fields, so a visitor doesn't need credentials handed to them.
That's a build-time opt-in, off everywhere else: the web image is built
with VITE_DEMO_USERNAME/VITE_DEMO_PASSWORD (set in the demo host's
docker-compose.override.yml), and the login page prefills only when it
has both. Any deployment that doesn't set them gets the ordinary empty
form -- see web/src/lib/api.ts's demoUsername.
The password is baked into the static bundle, which is fine for exactly
this case and nothing else: a Viewer-role account on a deployment whose
database is wiped and reseeded nightly. It has to match DEMO_PASSWORD
in reset-demo.sh, and changing that means rebuilding the web image.
Why the demo needs a long-running process
Three things the demo has to show are only true if data keeps arriving, and no amount of one-shot seeding fixes any of them:
- Agents. The Agents page is populated by the
AgentControl.CheckInRPC, and marks a host stale once it stops calling in. A fleet seeded once at 04:00 is entirely stale by 04:10. - Alerts. Rules evaluate over trailing windows (
earliest=-5m). Against a frozen dataset every rule settles into a permanent state within minutes and the Alerts page never moves again. - Recent views. A "last 15 minutes" dashboard, or a query for what just happened, is empty on a dataset that stopped growing overnight.
So the demo runs demo-simulator continuously, and reset-demo.sh only
handles the parts that genuinely are one-shot: the history behind the
present, and the dashboards and rules themselves.
Editing a dashboard
Change it in the web UI, hit Export JSON, and drop the file in
dashboards/ — the export shape and the import shape are the same one.
The next reset picks it up. (Note that panel IDs and the dashboard ID are
not part of that shape: every reset creates them fresh.)
What the queries can't do yet
Every panel here uses table, bar, top_n, single_stat, or
heatmap. None uses line, because a line chart needs a time axis and
the query language has no time-bucketing function — stats count by <field> groups by literal column values, so there's no equivalent of
Splunk's bin/timechart to group by hour or minute. Raw SQL could
express it (toStartOfHour(timestamp)), but dashboard panels reject the
SQL escape hatch by design, since the time-range picker works by
prepending earliest=/latest= terms to a pipe-syntax query
(see api/dashboards/types.go's validatePanel).
That gap is the one real thing standing between these dashboards and a conventional observability overview screen.