docs(dlq): help on-call find what's failing when a DLQ alert fires#210
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docs(dlq): help on-call find what's failing when a DLQ alert fires#210scotwells wants to merge 1 commit into
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The DLQ runbooks pointed at `kubectl logs --tail | grep`, which misses DLQ failures that predate the current pods (the common case), can't aggregate or count across time, and used a stale pod selector. There was no Loki/LogQL guidance anywhere in docs/. - Add docs/runbooks/dlq/querying-logs-with-loki.md: how to reach Loki, the base selector and structured log fields, triage recipes mapped to each DLQ alert, and gotchas (line truncation, query-window/retention limits, depth-is-a-metric). - Replace the kubectl-logs steps in the five DLQ runbooks with LogQL queries that filter on the stable structured fields (errorType, policy, err, auditID).
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ecv
approved these changes
Jun 25, 2026
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What this does
When a Dead Letter Queue alert fires, whoever's on call needs to find which activity policy is failing, and why — quickly. Today the runbooks send them to a quick command that only shows the last few minutes of logs from whichever pods happen to be running right now. The failures that set off these alerts are usually older than that, so the most useful clues are often already gone — and there was no guidance on how to search our log history instead.
This gives on-call a clear, copy-paste path to the right logs, so they can go from "an alert fired" to "this specific policy is broken on this field" in a couple of steps.
What changed
Documentation only — no behavior changes.
Related
Part of the larger effort to fix the DLQ failures that were silently dropping activities — and to make them easy to see and triage: