Root cause: k3s service ClusterIP routing instability causing intermittent
failures despite healthy pods. This is the 5th incident - prior fixes treated
symptoms, not the systemic networking fragility.
Changes:
- Add startup probe (60s delay, prevents premature service registration)
- Fix backup job env var substitution (use shell ${VAR}, not K8s $(VAR))
- Add comprehensive monitoring (ServiceMonitor, PrometheusRule, blackbox probes)
- Add alerting for service failures, high latency, pod restarts, backup failures
Evidence:
- Pod healthy (4d15h uptime, 0 restarts) but service ClusterIP routing broken
- Direct pod IP worked, service ClusterIP failed with "Connection reset by peer"
- Iptables rules correct, endpoints correct, but packets not flowing
- Required pod restart + Traefik restart to restore service
Monitoring now tests full service path from outside cluster, not just pod health.
Will alert immediately on failures instead of relying on reactive discovery.
Related: DEV-213, DEV-221, DEV-223, DEV-224, DEV-230, DEV-231
Co-Authored-By: Paperclip <noreply@paperclip.ing>