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VRO Services, Points of Contact, and Issue Escalation Paths

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Gabriel Zurita edited this page Dec 2, 2024 · 13 revisions

Table of Contents

Intro

The VRO Services and Points of Contact is a resource for VRO Platform Engineers designed to map out the various services and partner applications that interact with the VRO platform. This document also serves as an escalation guide for troubleshooting, providing links to critical resources for all VRO-related services. The primary goal is to enable the VRO team to understand platform dependencies and streamline issue resolution.

For insights into how VRO dependencies interact, you can reference the VRO Service Architecture Diagram and the VA OCTO Organigram.

Note:

  • Urgent issues refer to SEV 1 and SEV 2 incidents.
  • Non-urgent issues refer to SEV 3 and SEV 4 and include sprint blockers.

Severity levels are explained here

VRO Partner Team Services

The VRO Partner Team manages the apps or services below.

Contention Classification (CC) Team

CC APP

Employee Experience (EE) Team

End Product Merge (EP Merge) App

Max Claim for Increase (Max CFI) App a.k.a. Max Ratings API

External VA Services and VRO Dependencies

The below are apps or services managed by VA Teams external of VRO, which VRO has built services to interface with.

Benefits Integration Platform (BIP) Team

  • Description: An external VA service that provides gateway access for VRO applications, exposing APIs to retrieve claim information, update statuses, and route claims. BIP claim information is sourced from VBMS and CorpDB and operates as a subset of the BEP team.
  • Repository: svc-bip-api
  • Monitoring: # TODO: add VRO dashboard links The BIP systems team sets up monitoring, and additional monitoring is performed for the BIE Kafka service. If we also wanted to see it, external access to this monitoring would need to be requested.
    • The Shared Services team also uses Grafana dashboards to monitor stream processors like the Contention Stream Processor (SP). The team constantly monitors SP logs to detect any issues.
    • See this thread for more details.
  • Points of Contact: Nathan Jolly ([email protected], lead engineer), Chris Puckett.
  • Escalation Path:
  • Documentation:

Benefits Gateway Service (BGS)

  • Description: Enables partner teams to create notes on veteran files.
  • Repository: svc-bgs-api
  • Monitoring: BGS does not share monitoring information with the VRO team.
  • Points of Contact:
  • Escalation Path:
    • Urgent: For urgent issues, escalate via BGS' Microsoft Teams channel to Lindsay Tucker. Explain the urgency, and she will handle it from there.
    • Non-Urgent: You can email the listed points of contact, notably Jimnay Patel. For non-urgent certs or WebLogic inquiries, you can contact Rama Yadlapalli.
  • Documentation:
    The BGS team does not directly provide specific documentation. If you would like more insights, please refer to the VRO Architecture Mural.

Benefits Integration Events (BIE)

  • Description: This team provides event streams for claims processing, specifically handling contention changes on disability compensation forms (526). It is also known as the Shared Services Team or BIE Kafka Team.
  • Repository: svc-bie-kafka
  • Monitoring: The BIE Team does not share monitoring information with the VRO team, so we must use VRO dashboards and alerts (TODO: add links)
  • Points of Contact: Darrell Neel and Mohietosh Gill
  • Escalation Path:
    • Urgent: For urgent requests and/or to ask questions, use #bip-support-ext-vro.
    • Non-urgent: Submit non-urgent requests through the BIE Request Form After submitting the form, you'll be prompted to complete a Corp DB application request. The BIE team will provide a link after the initial submission.
      • The request is reviewed by their internal review board, which has final approval authority.
      • Once VRO receives approval from this team, VRO can proceed with implementing the new API connection.
  • Documentation: Benefits Integration Events Documentation

Lighthouse Development Infrastructure (LHDI)

  • Description: The Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure (LHDI) is a cloud-native platform that supports VRO by providing scalable and secure environments for VA application deployment. Using AWS Managed Kubernetes clusters, LHDI enables rapid, secure deployments and automates DevOps processes, allowing VRO's partner teams to focus on application development without handling infrastructure complexities. It integrates key services such as BIP APIs, BEP Services, and IAM for authentication and data management, ensuring smooth and secure operations across the platform.
  • Monitoring: See the LHDI docs alerts section and their oncall-operations doc.
  • Points of Contact: Tyler Snell is the LHDI Enablement Liaison assigned to VRO.
  • Escalation Path:
  • Support Requests (From LHDI Enablement): For support tickets, we ask submitters to provide the urgency of the request based on the impact on their operation:
    • Minimal: Quality-of-life or other minor annoyance.
    • Moderate: Needed to fulfill a program requirement, but not in the next few sprints.
    • High: Workaround or interim solution exists but causes work degradation.
    • Critical: The issue causes a work stoppage or threatens data integrity/security. When submitted, the support team will assess it for completeness and understanding. The more details the submitter provides, the more quickly we can prioritize and add the issue to the queue. Based on the issue's scope and scale, queue size, and assessment, the priority will be set at the levels below and will be updated at the given intervals:
    • Low: update once a week.
    • Medium: update every 72 hours.
    • High: daily.
    • All: updates as information and progress milestones are made.
  • Documentation:
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