Neither LLM endpoint was scraped, and frank-medium exports 418 vllm: series —
including the ones this fleet argues about under load: kv_cache_usage_perc (how
full the per-card pool is), prefix_cache_hit_rate (whether pinned conversations
are being reused), num_requests_waiting (queue depth) and the request-latency
histograms. Everything diagnosed tonight by hand — 122,636 KV tokens per card,
thrash when three large contexts overlap, cold-vs-warm prefix reuse — is a
graph now, on the LAN addresses rather than the guarded vhosts.
frank-large comes along in the same change: llama.cpp exposes throughput
counters under llamacpp:, and watching one LLM endpoint without the other was
arbitrary.
The seam added to observability_quadlet.bats pins the cross-file contract that
breaks silently: if a scrape target drifts from the :7770 the units publish,
the graphs vanish with no error anywhere.
The healthcheck added to the loki image was discarded by the build:
'HEALTHCHECK is not supported for OCI image format and will be ignored'.
podman builds OCI by default, and OCI has no HEALTHCHECK field, so the
container came back with no health at all — worse than the failing check it
replaced, because nothing reports the loss.
The build now passes --format docker, and the seam pins it so a future edit
cannot quietly reintroduce an image with no health field.
The loki unit came up 'unhealthy' after the quadlet cutover. Cause: a unit's
HealthCmd reaches podman as CMD-SHELL, i.e. /bin/sh -c, and the loki image is
distroless — no shell exists in it. The busybox command itself works (probed
by hand: /ready answers 'ready'); it was the shell wrapper that could not run.
podman does not accept an exec-form command through --health-cmd either: it
stores a JSON array as one literal argument.
The command therefore moves into dankclaw/loki/Containerfile as a
HEALTHCHECK ... CMD [...] exec form, which is what that image exists for — it
already ships the static busybox solely so a healthcheck has something to run.
podman reads the image's healthcheck when the unit declares none.
The first deploy of the grafana unit failed: 'stat /root/.config: permission
denied', exit 1, restart loop. Cause — the repo-root .env that the compose
service used to pick up is a gluetun env file, and it carries HOME=/root (and
the WireGuard keys). Pointing the unit's [Service] EnvironmentFile at it sets
HOME for the service, so podman looks for its configuration under /root.
grafana now reads /home/dank/Containers/grafana/env, the per-service file the
deployer seeds from dankclaw/.env with a single-variable filter — the same
shape caddy, pihole, copyparty, romm and seerr use. The seed is validated, so
a missing secret fails the deploy loudly instead of starting a container whose
OAuth login cannot complete. The value was copied to dankclaw/.env, which is
where dankclaw/.env.example already documented it.
prometheus, grafana, loki, alloy and node-exporter ran only from
dankclaw/compose.yaml. Rootless podman does not restart bare containers, so
they did not survive the 2026-09-11 reboot for the amd_iommu=off change and
had to be restored by hand — the same gap that had already cost the fleet
Caddy and Pi-hole, which is why the boot-persistence rule exists.
Each is now a rootless Quadlet unit under dankclaw/observability/quadlet/,
installed and dispatched by deploy_observability in deploy-remote.sh, with
the compose definitions retired so only one owner exists per container name.
Images, mounts, arguments and container names are unchanged, so Caddy's
proxies and Prometheus' own scrape config keep resolving.
Two posture changes, both about the unauthenticated surface:
* The three HTTP UIs published on 0.0.0.0 with no authentication of any kind
(Prometheus even with the lifecycle endpoint enabled). They now publish on
127.0.0.1: the browser path is the guarded franksdank.cloud vhost, Caddy
reaches them by name over dankclaw_default, and the host-side homepage
status timer probes loopback. Nothing legitimately used the LAN port.
* node-exporter bound :9100 on every interface; it now binds exactly its two
consumers, loopback (homepage timer) and the LAN address (Prometheus, which
runs in a container and cannot reach the host's loopback).
alloy gains a reachable health endpoint: its UI listens on the container's
own loopback and alloy 1.x refuses a config block for it, so the compose
service had nothing to probe — the homepage status card for alloy read 'down'
continuously. The unit moves the UI with a command-line flag and publishes
127.0.0.1:12345.
grafana keeps its Authentik OAuth client secret without receiving the whole
.env: systemd expands the value from a [Service] EnvironmentFile, which never
reaches the container.
Frank