WFGY/ProblemMap/ops/debug_playbook.md

Debug playbook — incident triage for RAG pipelines

Purpose: step-by-step incident response guide emphasizing reproducible diagnostics and minimal-impact mitigations.

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1) Immediate triage (first 120s)

A — Gather context

• Who reported it? (pager/Slack/ticket)
• When did it start (wall time)?
• Scope: single user / single shard / whole cluster?

B — Quick readouts

• Health: curl -fsS http://$SERVICE/healthz
• Pods: kubectl -n $NS get pods -o wide
• Recent errors (last 10m):

  kubectl -n $NS logs -l app=rag --since=10m | tail -n 200
  
  
  

• Prometheus: check E2E p95 and error rate for last 10m.

C — Decide action mode

• If P0 (site down / data corruption) → Mitigate (circuit-break / rollback / redirect).
• If P1 (functional degradation, e.g., CHR drop) → Isolate & debug.

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2) Deterministic checks (no LLM calls)

Run these before calling LLMs — they’re cheap and often reveal root causes:

1. Check retrieval consistency for sample qids:

   curl -X POST http://$SERVICE/debug/retrieve -d '{"qid":"A123","q":"sample question"}' | jq
   

   Validate retrieved_ids and their hashes.

2. Check mem_rev/mem_hash: verify read vs bound value for turn:

   • Compare retrieved_snapshot.mem_rev vs generation.mem_rev.

3. Vectorstore health:

   • ping vectorstore API; check index shard status.

4. Index size & recent writes:

   • kubectl exec -n $NS <vector-pod> -- ls -lh /data/index

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3) Common root causes & mitigations

A. Retrieval empty / irrelevant

• Root cause: indexing job failed or namespace mismatch.

• Mitigation:

  • Restart indexer pod: kubectl -n $NS rollout restart deploy/indexer
  • Run reindex on a small sample and validate.

B. CHR drop but retrieval OK

• Root cause: generator hallucinating or prompt/template drift.

• Mitigation:

  • Turn on guard/refusal stricter mode (feature flag).
  • Re-run golden queries with ?dbg=full to capture prompt+context.

C. Bootstrap / readiness flapping

• Root cause: bootstrap order or missing dependency.

• Mitigation:

  • Ensure controller/migrations complete before retriever/generator start; kubectl apply ordering or Helm hooks.

D. LLM provider errors / rate limits

• Root cause: key expired or provider quota.
• Mitigation: switch to backup key or provider; throttle traffic until resolved.

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4) Live mitigation patterns (minimize impact)

1. Circuit-breaker (fast): return cached answer for known queries.
2. Throttle LLM: queue requests, lower concurrency.
3. Rollback: to last known-good release if config causes issue.
4. Read-only mode: stop writes to vectorstore if index corruption suspected.

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5) Postmortem checklist

• Timestamped timeline created.
• Root cause identified (primary + contributing).
• Actions taken documented.
• Follow-up tasks created (reindex, fix probe, add tests).
• Update runbook if new failure mode discovered.

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6) Useful debug commands (reference)

• Pod logs since N minutes:

  kubectl -n $NS logs -l app=rag --since=5m
  

• Exec into retriever pod:

  kubectl -n $NS exec -it deploy/retriever -- /bin/sh
  

• Check helm history:

  helm -n $NS history rag
  

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Links

• Deployment checklist → deployment_checklist.md
• Live monitoring → live_monitoring_rag.md
• Failover & Recovery → failover_and_recovery.md

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🔗 Quick-Start Downloads (60 sec)

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