Errors and limits

Error shape

Errors Shriek raises are JSON with one field:

{"error": "period_secs must be >= 60 (the tick cadence); a shorter period cannot be honored"}

401 is always {"error":"unauthorized"} and 403 is always {"error":"forbidden"}. Neither says why.
5xx is always {"error":"internal error"}.
Other messages are written for people and may change. There are no error codes; branch on the status.

curl -sS https://shriek.dev/v1/shriek/alerts | grep -Fx '{"error":"unauthorized"}'

Some errors are not JSON. They come from request parsing, before Shriek looks at your credential, and are plain text:

Status	Cause	Example body
`400`	The body is not valid JSON, or a query value has the wrong type	`Failed to deserialize query string: since: invalid digit found in string`
`413`	Body larger than 64 KiB	`Failed to buffer the request body: length limit exceeded`
`415`	Body sent without `Content-Type: application/json`	Expected request with `Content-Type: application/json`
`422`	Body is JSON but a field is missing, empty, too long or not an allowed value	Failed to deserialize the JSON body into the target type: severity: unknown variant `error`, expected one of `info`, `warn`, `critical` at line 1 column 60

curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' 'https://shriek.dev/v1/shriek/alerts?since=abc' | grep -Fx 400

Status	Meaning
`200`	Done. Every success is `200`, including creates.
`400`	A rule the parser doesn’t check: `period_secs` under 60, `detail` over 4096 bytes, an incident id over 256 bytes, or a tenant or service in the path that isn’t valid.
`401`	No credential, or one Shriek can’t verify.
`403`	A valid credential that isn’t connected to a tenant. Also the edge’s rate limit; see below.
`404`	A heartbeat for, or publishing, a source that isn’t registered; retiring a source that was never registered; or resolving an incident that isn’t open.
`413`, `415`, `422`	Parsing errors; see above.
`500`	Something failed inside Shriek. Your alert may or may not have been recorded; read the feed before you retry, or accept a duplicate.
`503`	Shriek couldn’t check your token: it couldn’t reach ChirpAuth, or its record of which client belongs to which tenant. Nothing was recorded; retry with backoff.

Per IP address. More than 2,000 requests from one IP address in 5 minutes are blocked at the edge with 403, until the rate falls. That response is not Shriek’s JSON.
Shriek has no per-tenant quotas.

Limit	Value
Request body	64 KiB
`service`, `component`, `title`, `label`, public update `message`	1 to 256 bytes, after trimming spaces
Incident id, including `{service}/{component}#` before a `dedup_key`	256 bytes
`detail`	4096 bytes
`period_secs`	At least 60
Tenant name	Lowercase letters, digits and `-`, starting with a letter or digit; up to 256 bytes