Non-technical Description

When a trainee profile is created for the first time, TSS sends a “DataRequest” message to TIS to trigger a full data sync for the matching Person record. However, the TSS sync service has been failing to process those messages since August 2024. As a consequence, these new profiles may be missing key information that is needed to populate and send onboarding notifications, e.g. trainee email address, since TSS would otherwise only get this information if it happened to be updated in TIS after the trainee profile was created.

A large number of recent trainee onboarding notifications are recorded as ‘failed’ due to a missing email address.

Trigger

A version update of a library component used to send and receive messages (spring-cloud-aws upgraded from 2.4.x to 3.1.x, which we implemented in Dec 2023) introduced a deserialization message attribute with a class from the tis-trainee-details service (JavaType=uk.nhs.hee.trainee.details.event.ProfileCreateEvent)which the SQS listener in tis-trainee-sync then unsuccessfully attempted to use to deserialize the message, since it does not have access to that class.

As there is no DLQ for the profile created queue, no AWS alarms exist and the Sentry error-reporting service appears to be misconfigured for the sync service. As a consequence the error remained undetected.

Detection

Issue of large numbers of ‘failed’ onboarding emails reported to TSS team 7 Nov 2024.

Resolution

Timeline

All times GMT unless otherwise indicated.

• 07 Nov 2024 10:30 As part of the discussion around

  Jira Legacy
  server System Jira serverId 4c843cd5-e5a9-329d-ae88-66091fcfe3c7 key TIS21-6673

  , it was mentioned that unusually large numbers of emails for trainee onboarding were being recorded as ‘failed’ due to no email address, but that the trainees in question had email addresses in TIS.

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Action Items

See also:

Lessons Learned