personal_infra/ansible/roles/gatus/templates/docker-compose.yml.j2
counterweight 3a9e1d5851
alerting: Signal via signal-cli-rest-api, and faster failure detection
Three changes: detection windows tightened, a Signal transport deployed, and
alerts attached to all 84 non-transport endpoints.

── Failing faster ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The heartbeat is a TICKER, not a deadline: Gatus wakes every interval and asks
"did anything arrive in the last interval", so real detection is 1-2x the
window. And a window can only ever be as tight as the push frequency - which is
why two checks moved rather than just having their numbers changed.

  liveness, cpu, ups, service-health, probes   16m -> 11m
  disk, zfs                       daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
  backup store + pull job         daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
  DNS records                           24h -> 6h
  backup dump                             30h -> 26h

backup-dump stays slow because the dump genuinely is daily. The store-side check
catches the same fault within 6h by reading the source's dump timestamp out of
the artefact filename, so 26h is a backstop rather than the primary signal.

── Thresholds differ by check type, deliberately ───────────────────────────
`failure-threshold` counts consecutive failures, but "consecutive" is a
different amount of wall-clock time per check: a push endpoint produces one
failure per heartbeat window, a pulled one per interval. The default of 3 would
mean 33 minutes on an 11m heartbeat and over a day on a 7h one.

More importantly the heartbeat window ALREADY encodes the tolerance - an 11m
window on a 5-minute push is exactly "one missed push forgiven" - so stacking a
threshold of 3 triples a tolerance that was already chosen. Hence:

  push/heartbeat endpoints   failure-threshold 1
  pulled, 5m (public)        failure-threshold 3   (= 15 minutes)
  pulled, 6h/24h (dns, domain) failure-threshold 1

── The Signal transport ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
roles/signal_api runs signal-cli-rest-api on the observability host, pinned by
digest, MODE=native.

It publishes NO PORTS. The API has no authentication of any kind - anything that
reaches it can send messages as you and read your Signal. Gatus talks to it over
a shared docker network by service name, which is also WHY the network exists:
Gatus runs in a container, so the host's loopback is unreachable from it and a
port published on 127.0.0.1 would not have worked.

MODE=native and not json-rpc because this VPS has 464MB of RAM and already runs
Gatus and Caddy. The json-rpc modes hold a resident JVM; native runs a binary
per request, and alerts are rare enough that startup cost per alert is the right
trade.

Monitored - Gatus polls /v1/health over the same network path the alerts take,
so it proves the delivery route rather than mere container liveness. Deliberately
NOT backed up: the data directory holds Signal private keys and the recovery
path is to link the device again from the phone.

Neither the signal-api endpoint nor Gatus's self-check carries a Signal alert.
If either is down, Signal is precisely what cannot deliver the alert.

── Four traps hit while linking, all now in the role README ────────────────
  * /v1/qrcodelink is BROKEN in native mode - returns "no data to encode" while
    the binary itself emits a perfectly good URI. Not worked around by switching
    MODE, which would put a JVM in the path of every alert permanently.
  * The data dir must be owned by uid 1000, not root. A root-owned 0700 dir
    cannot be traversed by the container user, so linking silently never
    completes and /v1/accounts returns "Failed to read local accounts list".
  * `docker exec` runs as ROOT while the service runs as uid 1000, so without
    --config the account is written to /root/... on the container's ephemeral
    layer. It reports success and is destroyed on the next recreate.
  * The phone reporting "network error" was IPv6: chat.signal.org resolves to
    dualstack AAAA records first, the container has no IPv6 address, and this
    host's IPv6 path is broken - the same edge that 404'd the Go tarball. Fixed
    with a mounted gai.conf that prefers IPv4.

Verified: provider loads (configuredProviders=[signal]), a test message was
delivered and confirmed received, 84 endpoints carry alerts, 86 UP / 0 DOWN.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 21:40:37 +02:00

53 lines
1.6 KiB
Django/Jinja

# Managed by Ansible (roles/gatus)
services:
gatus:
image: {{ gatus_image }}
container_name: gatus
restart: unless-stopped
# The image is FROM scratch: no /etc/passwd, so there is no user to drop to
# by name and the default is root. Run it by numeric id instead.
user: "{{ gatus_uid }}:{{ gatus_gid }}"
ports:
# Loopback on purpose. Caddy fronts this, and the external-endpoint push
# API is served from the same listener as the dashboard - publishing
# 0.0.0.0 would put both straight on the public internet.
- "{{ gatus_bind_address }}:{{ gatus_port }}:{{ gatus_port }}"
environment:
GATUS_CONFIG_PATH: /config
GATUS_LOG_LEVEL: "{{ gatus_log_level }}"
volumes:
- {{ gatus_config_dir }}:/config:ro
- {{ gatus_data_dir }}:/data
# Hardening. The systemd unit this replaced got most of it from
# ProtectSystem/NoNewPrivileges/etc; these are the container equivalents.
read_only: true
security_opt:
- no-new-privileges:true
cap_drop:
- ALL
{% if gatus_allow_icmp %}
cap_add:
# icmp:// endpoints need raw sockets. Dropped above with ALL, added back
# explicitly so the grant is visible rather than inherited from root.
- NET_RAW
{% endif %}
networks:
# Shared with signal-api, so alerts can be delivered by service name.
# 127.0.0.1 inside this container is the container, not the host.
- {{ gatus_network }}
logging:
driver: json-file
options:
max-size: "10m"
max-file: "3"
networks:
{{ gatus_network }}:
external: true