# Red Panda Approval™ Standards

Quality and observability standards for the Ouranos Lab. All infrastructure code, application code, and LLM-generated code deployed into this environment must meet these standards.

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## 🐾 Red Panda Approval™

All implementations must meet the 5 Sacred Criteria:

1. **Fresh Environment Test** — Clean runs on new systems without drift. No leftover state, no manual steps.
2. **Elegant Simplicity** — Modular, reusable, no copy-paste sprawl. One playbook per concern.
3. **Observable & Auditable** — Clear task names, proper logging, check mode compatible. You can see what happened.
4. **Idempotent Patterns** — Run multiple times with consistent results. No side effects on re-runs.
5. **Actually Provisions & Configures** — Resources work, dependencies resolve, services integrate. It does the thing.

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## Vault Security

All sensitive information is encrypted using Ansible Vault with AES256 encryption.

**Encrypted secrets:**
- Database passwords (PostgreSQL, Neo4j)
- API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Groq)
- Application secrets (Grafana, SearXNG, Arke)
- Monitoring alerts (Pushover integration)

**Security rules:**
- AES256 encryption with `ansible-vault`
- Password file for automation — never pass `--vault-password-file` inline in scripts
- Vault variables use the `vault_` prefix; map to friendly names in `group_vars/all/vars.yml`
- No secrets in plain text files, ever

---

## Log Level Standards

All services in the Ouranos Lab MUST follow these log level conventions. These rules apply to application code, infrastructure services, and any LLM-generated code deployed into this environment. Log output flows through Alloy → Loki → Grafana, so disciplined leveling is not cosmetic — it directly determines alert quality, dashboard usefulness, and on-call signal-to-noise ratio.

### Level Definitions

| Level | When to Use | What MUST Be Included | Loki / Grafana Role |
|-------|-------------|----------------------|---------------------|
| **ERROR** | Something is broken and requires human intervention. The service cannot fulfil the current request or operation. | Exception class, message, stack trace, and relevant context (request ID, user, resource identifier). Never a bare `"something failed"`. | AlertManager rules fire on `level=~"error\|fatal\|critical"`. These trigger Pushover notifications. |
| **WARNING** | Degraded but self-recovering: retries succeeding, fallback paths taken, thresholds approaching, deprecated features invoked. | What degraded, what recovery action was taken, current metric value vs. threshold. | Grafana dashboard panels. Rate-based alerting (e.g., >N warnings/min). |
| **INFO** | Significant lifecycle and business events: service start/stop, configuration loaded, deployment markers, user authentication, job completion, schema migrations. | The event and its outcome. This level tells the *story* of what the system did. | Default production visibility. The go-to level for post-incident timelines. |
| **DEBUG** | Diagnostic detail for active troubleshooting: request/response payloads, SQL queries, internal state, variable values. | **Actionable context is mandatory.** A DEBUG line with no detail is worse than no line at all. Include variable values, object states, or decision paths. | Never enabled in production by default. Used on-demand via per-service level override. |

### Anti-Patterns

These are explicit violations of Ouranos logging standards:

| ❌ Anti-Pattern | Why It's Wrong | ✅ Correct Approach |
|----------------|---------------|-------------------|
| Health checks logged at INFO (`GET /health → 200 OK`) | Routine HAProxy/Prometheus probes flood syslog with thousands of identical lines per hour, burying real events. | Suppress health endpoints from access logs entirely, or demote to DEBUG. |
| DEBUG with no context (`logger.debug("error occurred")`) | Provides zero diagnostic value. If DEBUG is noisy *and* useless, nobody will ever enable it. | `logger.debug("PaymentService.process failed: order_id=%s, provider=%s, response=%r", oid, provider, resp)` |
| ERROR without exception details (`logger.error("task failed")`) | Cannot be triaged without reproduction steps. Wastes on-call time. | `logger.error("Celery task invoice_gen failed: order_id=%s", oid, exc_info=True)` |
| Logging sensitive data at any level | Passwords, tokens, API keys, and PII in Loki are a security incident. | Mask or redact: `api_key=sk-...a3f2`, `password=*****`. |
| Inconsistent level casing | Breaks LogQL filters and Grafana label selectors. | **Python / Django**: UPPERCASE (`INFO`, `WARNING`, `ERROR`, `DEBUG`). **Go / infrastructure** (HAProxy, Alloy, Gitea): lowercase (`info`, `warn`, `error`, `debug`). |
| Logging expected conditions as ERROR | A user entering a wrong password is not an error — it is normal business logic. | Use WARNING or INFO for expected-but-notable conditions. Reserve ERROR for things that are actually broken. |

### Health Check Rule

> All services exposed through HAProxy MUST suppress or demote health check endpoints (`/health`, `/healthz`, `/api/health`, `/metrics`, `/ping`) to DEBUG or below. Health check success is the *absence* of errors, not the presence of 200s. If your syslog shows a successful health probe, your log level is wrong.

**Implementation guidance:**
- **Django / Gunicorn**: Filter health paths in the access log handler or use middleware that skips logging for probe user-agents.
- **Docker services**: Configure the application's internal logging to exclude health routes — the syslog driver forwards everything it receives.
- **HAProxy**: HAProxy's own health check logs (`option httpchk`) should remain at the HAProxy level for connection debugging, but backend application responses to those probes must not surface at INFO.

### Background Worker & Queue Monitoring

> **The most dangerous failure is the one that produces no logs.**

When a background worker (Celery task consumer, RabbitMQ subscriber, Gitea Runner, cron job) fails to start or crashes on startup, it generates no ongoing log output. Error-rate dashboards stay green because there is no process running to produce errors. Meanwhile, queues grow unbounded and work silently stops being processed.

**Required practices:**

1. **Heartbeat logging** — Every long-running background worker MUST emit a periodic INFO-level heartbeat (e.g., `"worker alive, processed N jobs in last 5m, queue depth: M"`). The *absence* of this heartbeat is the alertable condition.

2. **Startup and shutdown at INFO** — Worker start, ready, graceful shutdown, and crash-exit are significant lifecycle events. These MUST log at INFO.

3. **Queue depth as a metric** — RabbitMQ queue depths and any application-level task queues MUST be exposed as Prometheus metrics. A growing queue with zero consumer activity is an **ERROR**-level alert, not a warning.

4. **Grafana "last seen" alerts** — For every background worker, configure a Grafana alert using `absent_over_time()` or equivalent staleness detection: *"Worker X has not logged a heartbeat in >10 minutes"* → ERROR severity → Pushover notification.

5. **Crash-on-start is ERROR** — If a worker exits within seconds of starting (missing config, failed DB connection, import error), the exit MUST be captured at ERROR level by the service manager (`systemd OnFailure=`, Docker restart policy logs). Do not rely on the crashing application to log its own death — it may never get the chance.

### Production Defaults

| Service Category | Default Level | Rationale |
|-----------------|---------------|-----------|
| Django apps (Angelia, Athena, Kairos, Icarlos, Spelunker, Peitho, MCP Switchboard) | `WARNING` | Business logic — only degraded or broken conditions surface. Lifecycle events (start/stop/deploy) still log at INFO via Gunicorn and systemd. |
| Gunicorn access logs | Suppress 2xx/3xx health probes | Routine request logging deferred to HAProxy access logs in Loki. |
| Infrastructure agents (Alloy, Prometheus, Node Exporter) | `warn` | Stable — do not change without cause. |
| HAProxy (Titania) | `warning` | Connection-level logging handled by HAProxy's own log format → Alloy → Loki. |
| Databases (PostgreSQL, Neo4j) | `warning` | Query-level logging only enabled for active troubleshooting. |
| Docker services (Gitea, LobeChat, Nextcloud, AnythingLLM, SearXNG) | `warn` / `warning` | Per-service default. Tune individually if needed. |
| LLM Proxy (Arke) | `info` | Token usage tracking and provider routing decisions justify INFO. Review periodically for noise. |
| Observability stack (Grafana, Loki, AlertManager) | `warn` | Should be quiet unless something is wrong with observability itself. |

### Loki & Grafana Alignment

**Label normalization**: Alloy pipelines (syslog listeners and journal relabeling) MUST extract and forward a `level` label on every log line. Without a `level` label, the log entry is invisible to level-based dashboard filters and alert rules.

**LogQL conventions for dashboards:**
```logql
# Production error monitoring (default dashboard view)
{job="syslog", hostname="puck"} | json | level=~"error|fatal|critical"

# Warning-and-above for a specific service
{service_name="haproxy"} | logfmt | level=~"warn|error|fatal"

# Debug-level troubleshooting (temporary, never permanent dashboards)
{container="angelia"} | json | level="debug"
```

**Alerting rules** — Grafana alert rules MUST key off the normalized `level` label:
- `level=~"error|fatal|critical"` → Immediate Pushover notification via AlertManager
- `absent_over_time({service_name="celery_worker"}[10m])` → Worker heartbeat staleness → ERROR severity
- Rate-based: `rate({service_name="arke"} | json | level="error" [5m]) > 0.1` → Sustained error rate

**Retention alignment**: Loki retention policies should preserve ERROR and WARNING logs longer than DEBUG. DEBUG-level logs generated during troubleshooting sessions should have a short TTL or be explicitly cleaned up.

---

## Documentation Standards

Place documentation in the `/docs/` directory of the repository.

### HTML Documents

HTML documents must follow [docs/documentation_style_guide.html](documentation_style_guide.html).

- Use Bootstrap CDN with Bootswatch theme **Flatly**
- Include a dark mode toggle button in the navbar
- Use Bootstrap Icons for icons
- Use Bootstrap CSS for styles — avoid custom CSS
- Use **Mermaid** for diagrams

### Markdown Documents

Only these status symbols are approved:
- ✔ Success/Complete
- ❌ Error/Failed
- ⚠️ Warning/Caution
- ℹ️ Information/Note