ouranos/docs/Red_Panda_Standards_V1-00.md

# 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.

**Owner:** Robert Helewka <r@helu.ca>
**Version:** 1.00
**Last reviewed:** 2026-04-18

---

## 🐾 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.

---

## 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 (AlertManager email 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 email 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/metrics checks logged at INFO (`GET /live → 200 OK`, `GET /metrics → 200 OK`) | Routine HAProxy/Prometheus probes flood syslog with thousands of identical lines per hour, burying real events. | Suppress successful probes to `/live`, `/ready`, `/metrics`, `/health*`, `/ping` from access logs entirely. Non-2xx responses MUST still log. |
| 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 & Monitoring Endpoint Rule

> All services MUST suppress successful (2xx/3xx) access log entries for health and monitoring endpoints: `/live`, `/ready`, `/health`, `/healthz`, `/api/health`, `/metrics`, `/ping`. Health check success is the *absence* of errors, not the presence of 200s. If your syslog shows a successful probe of one of these endpoints, your log level is wrong.
>
> Non-2xx responses to these paths MUST still be logged — a failing `/ready` is a real signal.

**Implementation guidance:**
- **Django / Gunicorn**: Filter health paths in the access log handler or use middleware that skips logging for probe user-agents.
- **FastAPI / Uvicorn**: Add a `logging.Filter` on the `uvicorn.access` logger that matches health paths in the access log message. Uvicorn's access log format includes the full request line in quotes (e.g., `"GET /live HTTP/1.1"`), so filter regexes must account for that. See also the structured logging notes below.
- **nginx containers**: nginx does not log through Python loggers, so app-level filters do not apply. Suppress probe access lines at the nginx config level using `map` on `$request_uri` or `$status`:
  ```nginx
  map $request_uri $loggable {
      ~^/(live|ready|metrics|health|healthz|ping)(/|$|\?) 0;
      default 1;
  }
  server {
      access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log combined if=$loggable;
      # errors (4xx/5xx) still logged via error_log regardless
  }
  ```
  Applies to every nginx-based container (static frontends, reverse proxies, sidecars).
- **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"`). **Cadence: every 60 seconds.** The staleness alert fires after 10 minutes of silence (= 10 consecutive missed heartbeats), which gives enough margin to absorb transient Loki ingestion lag without flapping. 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 → email notification via AlertManager.

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. |
| FastAPI apps (Periplus) | `WARNING` | Same rationale as Django. Uvicorn lifecycle events (start/stop) are pinned to INFO via the `uvicorn.error` logger regardless of app log level. |
| Gunicorn / Uvicorn / nginx access logs | Suppress successful probes to `/live`, `/ready`, `/metrics`, `/health*`, `/ping` | 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. |

### Structured Logging — FastAPI / Uvicorn

FastAPI apps using uvicorn require special handling to achieve JSON-structured log output for the Alloy → Loki pipeline. Uvicorn manages its own loggers aggressively, and naive approaches will fail silently.

**Required practices:**

1. **Override uvicorn's handlers, don't just add to root** — Uvicorn's `config.load()` creates its own `StreamHandler` instances on `uvicorn`, `uvicorn.error`, and `uvicorn.access`. You must remove these handlers and set `propagate = True` so log records flow to the root logger where your JSON formatter lives.

2. **Re-apply logging config in the lifespan** — Configuring logging at module import time is not sufficient. Uvicorn's `config.load()` runs *after* your module is imported but *before* the ASGI lifespan starts. Call your logging configuration function again inside the FastAPI `lifespan` context manager to recapture control.

3. **Remap uvicorn logger names** — Uvicorn uses `uvicorn.error` for all lifecycle messages (startup, shutdown, errors) despite the misleading name. Remap it to `uvicorn` in your JSON formatter's output for clarity in Loki queries.

4. **Use `pydantic-settings` with `extra = "ignore"`** — When loading config from `.env` files that contain variables for other services (e.g., oauth2-proxy), pydantic-settings will reject unknown fields by default. Always set `extra = "ignore"` in the model config.

### 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 email 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 MUST preserve higher-severity logs longer than lower-severity ones. Target retention:

| Level | Retention | Rationale |
|-------|-----------|-----------|
| DEBUG | 7 days | Troubleshooting context only — stale debug data is noise. |
| INFO | 30 days | Post-incident timelines and lifecycle review. |
| WARNING | 90 days | Degradation trend analysis across release cycles. |
| ERROR / FATAL / CRITICAL | 90 days | Incident review, root-cause investigation, compliance. |

DEBUG-level logs generated during troubleshooting sessions should be explicitly cleaned up if they would blow past the 7-day budget.

---

## Health Check Endpoints

All services MUST expose Kubernetes-style health endpoints at these paths:

| Endpoint | Purpose | Auth |
|----------|---------|------|
| `GET /live` | **Liveness** — process is running and accepting connections | None |
| `GET /ready` | **Readiness** — process is running AND all dependencies (DB, cache, upstream APIs) are healthy | None |
| `GET /metrics` | Prometheus metrics | IP-restricted (no JWT) |

- HAProxy uses `health_path: /ready/` (trailing slash) for backend health checks — return HTTP 200 when ready
- Health endpoints MUST NOT require authentication
- Third-party services use their native paths (`/api/health`, `/api/healthz`, `/-/healthy`, etc.)

**Trailing slash**: The standard path is `/ready/` with a trailing slash. Django's `APPEND_SLASH` handling, FastAPI route declarations, and nginx `location` blocks all differ in how they treat the slash. Services that cannot comply (framework redirects, third-party apps) MUST be recorded in the Exceptions section below. Access-log suppression filters MUST match both `/ready` and `/ready/` forms.

### Docker Compose Healthchecks

Use `curl -f` (install curl in images if needed). Do not use `wget --spider`.

```yaml
healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:8000/live"]
  interval: 30s
  timeout: 10s
  retries: 3
  start_period: 40s
```

---

## Endpoint Protection

| Protected (require valid JWT) | Unprotected |
|-------------------------------|-------------|
| All `/api/v1/*` routes | `GET /live` |
| | `GET /ready` |
| | `GET /metrics` (IP-restricted to internal networks) |
| | `GET /api/auth/login-url` |
| | `POST /api/auth/token` |
| | `POST /api/v1/telemetry` (sendBeacon cannot set headers) |

> **Why `/api/v1/telemetry` is unprotected**: The browser `sendBeacon` API cannot set `Authorization` headers. The telemetry endpoint must be open to receive client-side error reports and performance data, or browser errors will be silently lost.

---

## Prometheus Metrics

All services MUST expose `GET /metrics` in Prometheus exposition format, scraped by Prospero's Prometheus at 15s intervals.

- **IP-restricted** to internal networks: `10.10.0.0/24`, `172.16.0.0/12`, `127.0.0.0/8`
- No JWT required — HAProxy and Prometheus scrapers cannot authenticate
- Useful metrics to expose: request totals and durations, error rates, active connections, queue depths, dependency health

---

## Browser Telemetry

Frontend/browser code MUST report errors and performance data back to the server.

- Send to `POST /api/v1/telemetry` — unprotected endpoint
- Capture: JavaScript exceptions, promise rejections, resource load failures, performance metrics
- The server MUST log client-side exceptions at **WARNING** level (they indicate user-facing problems but are not server failures)
- Include enough context to reproduce: URL, user agent, error message, stack trace (if available)

---

## Environment Variable Naming

All environment variables for an application MUST use a consistent prefix matching the service name (e.g., `PERIPLUS_`, `ARKE_`, `ANGELIA_`). This applies to every variable in the `.env` file, including those consumed by sidecar services like oauth2-proxy.

**Rules:**
- All vars in `.env` use the `SERVICENAME_` prefix — no exceptions
- `compose.yaml` maps prefixed vars to the sidecar's expected names (e.g., `OAUTH2_PROXY_CLIENT_ID: ${PERIPLUS_CASDOOR_CLIENT_ID}`)
- The application's Settings model SHOULD declare all prefixed vars, even those only consumed by sidecars, so the full configuration is documented in one place
- Every repo MUST include a `.env.example` with placeholder values for all required variables. Add `!.env.example` to `.gitignore` if a broad `.env.*` pattern would otherwise exclude it
- `.env` files with real secrets are ALWAYS gitignored — no exceptions

---

## Docker Networking

- Use the **default Docker bridge network** for simple deployments
- Add additional named networks only when required (e.g., isolating database traffic) or explicitly requested
- Do not define custom networks for single-service Docker Compose stacks

---

## 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).

- Include a dark mode that follows the system automatically and include a toggle button in the navbar
- avoid custom CSS
- Use **Mermaid** for diagrams

---

## Exceptions

Third-party services and vendor containers frequently cannot comply with every standard in this document (health endpoint paths, access-log filtering, log level semantics, env var prefixes). Rather than force non-compliance into a binary pass/fail, record deviations here so the gap is visible and intentional.

**Rules for exceptions:**
- Every exception MUST name the service, the standard being waived, and the reason (vendor constraint, upstream bug, deliberate trade-off).
- Exceptions MUST be reviewed on the doc's `Last reviewed` date. If the underlying reason has gone away (vendor fixed it, we forked, we replaced the service), remove the exception.
- A missing exception for a known-non-compliant service is itself a Red Panda violation — the point is transparency.

| Service | Standard waived | Reason | Reviewed |
|---------|-----------------|--------|----------|
| _(example)_ Gitea | `/live`, `/ready` paths — uses `/api/healthz` | Upstream does not expose K8s-style endpoints | 2026-04-18 |
| _(example)_ Nextcloud | Env var prefix `NEXTCLOUD_` — uses vendor-defined `NC_*` and unprefixed vars | Vendor container ignores renamed vars | 2026-04-18 |
| _(add real exceptions as they are discovered)_ | | | |

**Health path trailing-slash exceptions** — services that serve `/ready` without the trailing slash (framework default, cannot be reconfigured without breaking routing):

| Service | Actual path | Reason |
|---------|-------------|--------|
| _(add as discovered)_ | | |