The canary deliberately sends forged tokens every 10 min; those refusal
rows read as attacks. It now sends X-Windy-Synthetic carrying a shared
secret (Gitea repo secret CANARY_SYNTHETIC_KEY = WINDYGIT_SYNTHETIC_KEY in
Veron .env); the API marks the row synthetic only on a constant-time
match, so an attacker cannot label their own refusals synthetic to hide.
synthetic is declared on forge.auth.failed (Telemetry Boss, UPDATE 3).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Today's outage is the whole design brief: /health returned 200 for the entire
hour that login was dead. A canary watching /health would have stayed green
while nobody in the ecosystem could sign in. So the login probe is here and it
is the one that matters.
Three rules it obeys:
- never green for something it did not prove (I-8)
- alert on TRANSITIONS, not every run — a canary people filter is a dead
canary, which is how the last one sat 37 days dead unnoticed
- run where the watched thing cannot take it down: Veron 1, never Kit 0
Two independent signals, so losing one still leaves the other: an email via
Resend on state change, and a non-zero exit that turns the CI run red in the
forge itself.
Alerts say what broke in human terms — 'a human can actually sign in' — rather
than only naming an endpoint.
Verified against production: 7/7 green including login at 17.1s; a forced 404
reports DOWN; a 1s threshold reports SLOW at 23.3s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
