At 30h a single missed cycle pages critical, and a single missed cycle is the
normal cost of touching the nodes. Velero moves data through pods, so draining
a node kills whatever upload is in flight and the schedule is lost for that day
— it is not retried. Backup windows run 03:15 to 08:45 UTC, so any rolling node
work overlapping them produced a guaranteed critical alert per affected
schedule.
That is noise about planned work, not signal about backups. It fired for eleven
schedules during the bare-metal Talos upgrade and again today.
60h still catches what the rule exists for. Two consecutive failures is no
longer explicable by one maintenance window. Nothing is hidden in the meantime:
VeleroBackupFailed fires on the first failure regardless, so the first cycle is
still visible — only the escalation to critical waits for a second cycle to
confirm it.
Calibration against the current state: the four stale schedules sit at 46.8 to
48.5 hours since their last success, so the new threshold leaves roughly twelve
hours — exactly until today's runs. If those fail too, the alert fires, which
is the intended behaviour rather than a gap.
Verified: the rule passes a server-side dry run, the expression returns nothing
at 60h, and the same query at a lower bound returns the four affected schedules
with their ages — so the selector is known to match rather than merely silent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>