Vast.ai Control-Plane Observability
Overview
Measure provider state and workload health separately. Alerts must identify a resource, threshold, evidence link, responder, and safe action; a dashboard without terminal-state and billing coverage is incomplete.
Prerequisites
- Instance, endpoint, workergroup, deployment, and account scopes
- Latency, error, queue, utilization, state-age, balance, and cost objectives
- Collection interval, retention, alert routing, and incident owner
Instructions
Step 1: Inventory labeled resources
Map instance labels and Serverless IDs to service, environment, release, cost center, and owner.
Step 2: Collect structured control state
Read instance actual status, timestamps, price, disk, and endpoints; collect endpoint/workergroup status, logs, and deployment versions.
Step 3: Collect workload signals
Measure request/job success, latency, queue time, GPU utilization, memory, disk, checkpoint age, and last successful artifact.
Step 4: Add billing protection
Track credit balance, instance and storage charges, active/stopped age, and orphaned resources. Alert before balance or cleanup risk becomes urgent.
Step 5: Define stateful alerts
Alert on terminal states, excessive transition age, queue/SLO breach, checkpoint staleness, low balance, and cleanup failure with deduplication.
Step 6: Test the path
Inject a canary event or threshold breach, verify delivery and ownership, then record recovery and false-positive behavior.
Authentication
Use read-only keys for collectors and distinct secrets for alert sinks. Never put a mutation-capable Vast.ai key in dashboards or telemetry processors.
Tool Discipline
Use Read and Grep to inspect manifests, configuration, provider output, and existing tests before proposing a mutation. Use Write or Edit only for the approved plan, implementation, test, or redacted receipt; do not create, update, destroy, or fund Vast.ai resources without explicit operator approval.
Output
- Resource-to-owner inventory and telemetry schema
- Dashboard and actionable alert definitions
- Alert-path test, retention, and unresolved coverage receipt
Return resource scope, collection interval, SLOs, tested alert, responder, evidence location, and blind spots.
Examples
A dashboard separates an instance's running state from workload request success, pages on stale external checkpoints and low balance, and assigns stopped-storage leaks to the billing owner.
Error Handling
| Failure | Response |
|---|---|
| Collector receives 403 | Add only the documented read category needed by that metric. |
| Resource is missing from inventory | Quarantine the alert and assign ownership before automated action. |
| Metrics lag exceeds the SLO | Mark the dashboard stale and use direct provider state during incidents. |
| Alert contains a secret or payload | Disable the route, scrub data, rotate credentials, and narrow fields. |