Sidecar memory leak causes container restart
Your pods run an Envoy sidecar (Istio-style). Starting 18:30 one service — orders-api — shows a steady ~6% of requests failing with connection resets / 'upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers', but only on a rotating subset of pods, and the failures come in short bursts. Dashboards: the app container's own latency and error metrics are clean; the sidecar's memory creeps to its limit and then drops, and `kubectl get pod` shows the istio-proxy container's restart count quietly incrementing (the POD isn't restarting, just the sidecar container). Traffic to orders-api is up ~30% this week after a marketing push. No app deploy. How do you triage and mitigate?
Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.