Date |
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Authors | |
Status | Resolved |
Summary | Unable to see connected doctors on the “current connections” page |
Impact |
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| Table of Contents |
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Non-technical Description
A Revalidation Admin drew our attention to some data that did not appear to be correct. In early October, we corrected how we handle whether a doctor is “under notice” for revalidation. As we only receive partial information from the GMC, we removed stale and potentially incorrect data from a number of records and proactively remove unreliable data as we get some information. One of our services relied on always maintaining knowledge of whether or not a doctor was “under notice”, which was no longer possible so it failed to keep those doctors records updated.
This meant for a small number of doctors who were connected to a NHS E designated body outside of TIS Revalidation after 5th October did not appear until Friday 3rd November, the first sync after releasing a fix. While investigating the problem on 2nd November, we came across an intermittent issue loading pages. This was resolved in part initially and fully within 3 hours of being noticed by the team and within 2 hours of being reported by users.
Having addressed the bug, we have identified that there are other places in the code which can be improved in the same way. For the issue of partial failures leading to error messages, we will be putting in place the kind of monitoring that will enable us to detect when there is an issue for 1 user and improve our ability to respond before it becomes a more widespread problem.
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Trigger
Updating under notice
Service Degradation?
Detection
User query on Teams
Resolution
Bugfix released 2nd Nov pm
Redeploying ?recommendation? service: tasks that were taking a long time to respond
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Timeline
All times in BST unless indicated
: Change released to correct data and processing for whether doctors are “under notice”.
~00:10 : Logs show that there are approx. 2 “Null Pointer Exception”s that mean we don’t 2 doctors as connected.
: 18:03 User queries connection status - Trainee is showing connected to us according to the on GMC but isn't in programme? Connect but not TIS Revalidation.
: 10:47 First responder requested when they were last connected via. GMC Connect?.
: 10:57 Reported that trainee are not even in the connections list on TIS but are on GMC connect - 18/10/2023.
: 11:04 reported that 7562969 another doctor was connected yesterday the day before but remains on the discrepancy list ? is this a different issue to the one listed above?as if they weren’t connected. It initially appeared to be different to the other doctor listed above.
: 11:40 Responder notified that the last time their records in revalidation were updated were the 18/10 & yesterday(1/11/23)
: Unable to manual get doctors for debugging failed: Request was blocked, possibly because of earlier bad requests.
: Manual verification of GMC responses showed 1 doctor was not in the list of connected doctors but the other was.
: Errors Further debugging identified the cause.
: While investing, errors in the Reval app point to another issue: Gateway timeouts some of the time
: Investigation
11:35 : replaced recommendation tasks in production
11:53 : replaced connection tasks in production
12:06 : replaced integration & core tasks in production
Root Cause(s)
Doctors weren’t appearing as Connected because they were marked as existsInGmc=false and no connected Designated Body but were in GMC Connect as connected.
The data remained without a connection because the nightly sync could not update information from the GMC.
Updates from the GMC failed because there was a NullPointerException.
There was a NullPointerException because our service didn’t handle null values in under notice and possibly others.
It was unhandled because we had relied on the fields always being populated. We changed this as the data available when it changes externally can be outdated.
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We (and then users) were unable load pages consistently because it sometimes came up with errors.
Errors were caused by “timeouts”.
The timeouts were reported by the API gateway because a downstream service did not respond within a maximum allowable time. API Gateway logs showed timeouts between 09:45 and 11:54 (HTTP 504) and latency
The connections service sometimes didn’t respond in the allowable time, possibly because it couldn’t be reached. There were no indications of a HTTP 504 in our services? We note that the correlation with “Unhealthy Routing Flow Count” for 2 of our 3 availability zones. This is why some actions were successful.
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Action Items
Action Items | Owner | |
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Alert on “Unhealthy Routing Flow Count” | Story | |
Could the error be more friendly… e.g. Timeouts “retry & contact if it keeps happening” | Conversation facilitated bycatherine.odukale (Unlicensed) | Refine/ Possible Story |
Extend/Improve reach of X-Ray service to better detect the location of failures | Story | |
Review Sentry and mark issues appropriately so we are alerted | Done with more cautious alerting & marking old issues resolved | |
Use Mapstruct through Reval services | Story |
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