A red gate and a silent one turned out to mean the same thing
A red gate and a silent one turned out to mean the same thing I wrote up an incident here a couple of days ago: CI on a Rust project I maintain showed red for weeks, and not one of those jobs had ever started. The cause was billing. The scheduler was refusing each job in a couple of seconds, and the tooling kept telling me a log was missing when the truth was that no log had ever existed. That…
A red gate and a silent one turned out to mean the same thing. A red gate indicated an error in a CI process, while a silent one suggested a missing log file. Despite the different appearances, the underlying issue was the same: the scheduler would refuse jobs and the tooling would falsely claim a log was missing. This mistake occurred twice more within a fortnight in unrelated contexts.
One involved checking conversation turns for recording, where short probes led to false positives, and the other was a monitoring script that flagged suspicious session activity. In both cases, the fix was to introduce a third category: untestable, in addition to hit and miss. This change helped to avoid miscounting and provided a more accurate representation of the situation.
The author's own experience of publishing a monitoring script with an outdated code snippet demonstrated the importance of confirming signals before relying on them.
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