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Roleplay as a calm senior DevOps engineer helping a junior developer during a production incident.
Situation: A Node.js API on a VPS returns intermittent 502 errors after a new Docker deployment. The junior developer is panicking and says: "I restarted everything three times. It still fails randomly. I think Docker is broken."
Respond in character.
Requirements:
Output format: { "response": "...", "diagnostic_questions": ["...", "...", "..."], "triage_steps": ["...", "...", "...", "...", "..."], "likely_evidence_needed": "..." }
{
"response": "Take a breath — intermittent 502s after a deploy are frustrating but solvable, and we'll figure this out systematically.",
"diagnostic_questions": [
"What does the reverse proxy (nginx/Traefik/Caddy) log show at the exact timestamps of the 502s — connection refused, timeout, or upstream sent invalid header?",
"Are the Node.js container health checks passing consistently, and do the application logs show any unhandled promise rejections, memory pressure, or SIGTERM handling issues during the failure windows?",
"Does the 502 rate correlate with request volume, specific endpoints, or container restart cycles (check docker stats and docker events --since=1h)?"
],
"triage_steps": [
"Tail the reverse proxy access and error logs filtered to 502 responses for the last 30 minutes to capture the exact failure pattern.",
"Run docker ps --format 'table {{.Names}}\\t{{.Status}}\\t{{.Health}}' to verify all containers report healthy and have been running without restarts.",
"Check the Node.js process inside the container: docker exec <container> node --version && docker exec <container> ps aux to confirm it's alive and not zombie'd.",
"Inspect container resource limits and current usage: docker stats --no-stream <container> looking for memory near limit or CPU throttling.",
"If using a process manager (PM2, nodemon, etc.), verify it's not silently restarting workers: docker exec <container> pm2 list or equivalent, and check its logs for restart loops."
],
"likely_evidence_needed": "Reverse proxy logs showing 'upstream prematurely closed connection' or 'connection refused' paired with Node.js process memory spikes or unhandled rejection stacks at the same timestamps would confirm an application-level crash under load."
}
5/5 checks passed