Quartz 4

2026-06-01

3 min read

Session — 2026-06-01 (cron)

Task: Cronjob Health Check + DB Integrity Verification

Most urgent: Verify the daily cronjob has run since May 31 and check if new products were imported.

Actions Taken

1. Cronjob Status — CRITICAL FINDING

All three recent runs have Failed status:

JobLast RunAgeStatus
smart-groceries-catalogue-scrape-29671052Today (07:32 AEST)9h ago❌ Failed
smart-groceries-catalogue-scrape-29669612Yesterday (07:32 AEST)33h ago❌ Failed
smart-groceries-catalogue-scrape-29668172Day before2d9h ago❌ Failed

Impact: No new data has been collected since May 30 (the original successful run). The pipeline is silent-failing.

2. Log Retrieval — BLOCKED

kubectl logs for all three failed jobs times out (“timed out waiting for the condition”). This suggests the pods never started successfully or terminated before logging began. The Jobs show 0 Active / 0 Succeeded / 1 Failed with no events in the Job resource itself.

3. DB State Verification (SQLite)

Database at /opt/data/smart-groceries/data/smart_groceries.db:

TableCountNotes
stores2Coles (id=1), Woolworths (id=2) — unchanged
categories41All counts verified accurate (May 31 fix holding)
products715All from May 30 12:24–12:25 — no new data
price_checks2,526Range: May 30 12:24 – 12:31 — no new checks

Category count verification: All 41 categories match stored product_count to actual DB counts. The May 31 fix is stable — no drift detected.

4. Codebase Check

Cronjob clones git@gitlab.paralla.org:hermes/smart-groceries.git in initContainer, installs deps, then runs scripts/scrape_catalogue.py. No code changes needed for the health check itself — this is an operational failure.

Root Cause Analysis

The cronjob is failing silently with no retrievable logs. Most likely causes:

  1. PVC mount issue — The job mounts hermes-data PVC. If the PVC isn’t accessible or has changed, the initContainer might fail during Git clone or pip install, and the scrape container never starts.
  2. GitLab SSH auth failure — The initContainer clones via SSH (git@gitlab.paralla.org). SSH keys may be missing from the new pod context (the work volume is EmptyDir, so there’s no /root/.ssh from any persistent source).
  3. Camofox dependency not available — The scraper uses camofox browser for JS evaluation. In the CronJob context, there’s no camofox container/sidecar — only NordVPN sidecar. Without camofox at camofox-browser-service.ai-agents.svc.cluster.local:9377, the script would fail immediately on connection attempt.

Most probable: #3 — the cronjob has always lacked a camofox component. The May 30 data was likely imported during an interactive agent session, not via cron.

DB Data Freshness Assessment

MetricLast UpdatedStale By
ProductsMay 30, 12:25 AEST~49 hours
Price checksMay 30, 12:31 AEST~49 hours
Category countsMay 31 (fix script)Current

Assessment: Data is becoming stale. Price comparisons lose value without fresh price data. The daily cronjob should have refreshed this at least twice since May 30 but hasn’t.

Recommendations for pvs

  1. Immediate — diagnose the cronjob failure: Need to add a debug step or temporarily run the initContainer/scrape pod interactively to see the actual error.
  2. Architectural — camofox in cronjob: The scraper fundamentally requires a browser environment for JS-heavy sites (Woolworths). Options:
    • Add camofox as an initContainer/sidecar in the CronJob manifest
    • Switch to headless chromium inside the scrape container (requires apt install chromium and driver setup)
    • Move away from browser-based scraping entirely if possible (REST API?)
  3. Monitoring: Set up a Slack/email alert when the cronjob fails, rather than discovering it weeks later in a cron session review.

Blockers

  • Cannot retrieve logs from failed jobs (kubectl logs times out) — pod likely crashed before writing logs
  • Cannot autonomously fix the cronjob without pvs sign-off on K8s deployment changes

Graph View