rippled/docker/telemetry/ALERTING.md

rippled OpenTelemetry Alerting Runbook

Phase 9 exports rippled's internal metrics and provisions Grafana alert rules on the health-critical ones. This document explains each alert, its likely cause, and how to point alerts at a real receiver.

The rules are provisioned from grafana/provisioning/alerting/ and load automatically when the Grafana container in docker-compose.yml starts — no manual setup in the Grafana UI. Rules appear in Grafana under Alerting → Alert rules, folder xrpld.

---

Alert catalogue

All rules evaluate every minute against the Prometheus datasource, over a 5-minute window, and group by exported_instance so each node alerts on its own. Alerts fire only after the condition holds for the for dwell time.

Alert	Severity	Fires when	For
LedgerHistoryMismatch	critical	rate(xrpld_ledger_history_mismatch_total) > 0	5m
LedgerCloseStalled	critical	rate(xrpld_ledgers_closed_total) ≈ 0	3m
ValidationsMissed	warning	rate(xrpld_validation_missed_total) > 0	5m
ValidationsNotChecked	warning	rate(xrpld_validations_checked_total) ≈ 0	5m
JobQueueTxOverflow	warning	rate(xrpld_jq_trans_overflow_total) > 0	5m
JobQueueLatencyHigh	warning	p99 xrpld_job_queued_duration_us > 1s	5m

Consensus / ledger health

LedgerHistoryMismatch — The node closed a ledger whose history diverges from the validated network chain. Likely causes: corrupted local state, a bug, or a node that fell out of sync and rebuilt incorrectly. Investigate the node's ledger acquisition logs; a healthy node never mismatches.

LedgerCloseStalled — No ledgers closed for 3 minutes. A healthy node closes one every ~3-5s. Likely causes: lost peer connectivity, consensus stall, or the process is hung. This rule also fires on NoData — if the series disappears the node is likely down. Check peer count and process health first.

Validator health

ValidationsMissed — This validator's validations are not agreeing with the validated ledger. Sustained misses risk removal from UNLs. Check clock sync, peer connectivity, and whether the node is keeping up with ledger close.

ValidationsNotChecked — The node has stopped checking incoming validations from peers. Likely causes: overlay/peer disconnection or a stalled validation pipeline. Fires on NoData as well.

Job queue / resource health

JobQueueTxOverflow — The transaction job queue is full and transactions are being dropped. The node is shedding load it cannot process. Check CPU, the JobQueueLatencyHigh alert, and offered load.

JobQueueLatencyHigh — p99 queue wait exceeds 1 second, i.e. jobs back up before running. The node is saturated. Correlate with CPU and the Job Queue dashboard.

---

Tuning thresholds

Thresholds live in grafana/provisioning/alerting/rules.yaml as the params array of each rule's C (threshold) node. Common tunables:

• JobQueueLatencyHigh — params: [1000000] is 1 000 000 µs (1s). Lower it for latency-sensitive deployments.
• LedgerCloseStalled / ValidationsNotChecked — use lt with a tiny epsilon (0.001) rather than 0, so floating-point rate noise near zero does not suppress the alert.

Edit the file and restart the Grafana container to reload:

docker compose -f docker/telemetry/docker-compose.yml restart grafana

---

Sending alerts somewhere real

The provisioned contact point xrpld-default (contactpoints.yaml) ships as a local-dev webhook to a placeholder URL — alerts fire but go nowhere until you change it.

Option A — repoint the webhook. Replace the url under the webhook receiver with a real endpoint (PagerDuty Events API, Opsgenie, a custom sink).

Option B — add a Slack receiver. Add a second receiver to the same contact point:

- uid: xrpld-slack
  type: slack
  settings:
    url: https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXX/YYY/ZZZ
    title: "{{ .CommonLabels.alertname }} on {{ .CommonLabels.exported_instance }}"

Option C — email. Requires Grafana SMTP configured via GF_SMTP_* environment variables on the Grafana service in docker-compose.yml, then an email receiver with addresses.

Routing is a single flat policy in policies.yaml: all alerts → xrpld-default, grouped by alertname + exported_instance. To route critical alerts to a different receiver, add child routes matching severity = critical.

---

Verifying provisioning loaded

After the stack is up:

# All six rules present?
curl -s http://localhost:3000/api/v1/provisioning/alert-rules | jq '.[].title'

# Contact point present?
curl -s http://localhost:3000/api/v1/provisioning/contact-points | jq '.[].name'

Grafana logs a provisioning error and skips the file if the YAML is malformed:

docker compose -f docker/telemetry/docker-compose.yml logs grafana | grep -i alerting