This follows the pattern for invite emails where the admin app tells the
API which domain to use when generating the link.
This will starting working once this admin change is merged:
- [ ] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-admin/pull/4150/files
It won’t break anything if it’s merged before the admin change.
as a team we primarily develop locally. However, we've been experiencing
issues with pycurl, a subdependency of celery, that is notoriously
difficult to install on mac. On top of the existing issues, we're also
seeing it conflict with pyproj in bizarre ways (where the order of
imports between pyproj and pycurl result in different configurations of
dynamically linked C libraries being loaded.
You are encouraged to attempt to install pycurl locally, following these
instructions: https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-manuals/wiki/Getting-Started#pycurl
However, if you aren't having any luck, you can instead now run celery
in a docker container.
`make run-celery-with-docker`
This will build a container, install the dependencies, and run celery
(with the default of four concurrent workers).
It will pull aws variables from your aws configuration as boto would
normally, and it will attempt to connect to your local database with the
user `postgres`. If your local database is configured differently (for
example, with a different user, or on a different port), then you can
set the SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI locally to override that.
This caught me out the other day when I was testing. I thought antivirus
was enable, seeing this message didn't help with that assumption. Plus
there is no point in showing the log if we don't actually call the task.
Previously we think this setting was necessary to avoid a memory
leak [1], but it's unclear if this is still an issue:
- We've advanced two major versions of Celery.
- Some of the tasks are now quicker and leaner.
Restarting worker sub-processes after each task is a big problem
for performance, as we move towards parallelising our reporting.
This is something of a test to see if we can manage without this
setting. Note that we need to unset the variable manually:
cf unset-env notify-delivery-worker-reporting CELERYD_MAX_TASKS_PER_CHILD
In the worst case we can always re-run any failed tasks. To check
the worker is still behaving as expected, we can:
- Monitor CPU / memory graphs for it.
- Check `cf events` for unexpected restarts / crashes.
- Compare numbers of task completion logs to previous days.
- Check the number of new billing / status rows looks right.
[1]: ad419f7592
we try and delete for lots of services. this includes services that
don't actually have anything to delete that day. that might be because
they had a custom data retention so we always go to check them, or
because they only sent test notifications (which we'll delete but not
include in the count in the log line). we don't really need to see log
lines saying that we didn't delete anything for that service - that's
just a long list of boring log messages that will hide the actual
interesting stuff - which services we did delete content for.
This is because that function is used both when broadcast status
is updated via API and via admin, so it's a shared resource.
Also move and update tests for updating broadcast message status
so things are tested at source and repetition is avoided.
The top-level task didn't run successfully after this was deployed
due to the worker being killed due to heavy disk usage. While the
more parallel version does log much more, it doesn't totally explain
the disk behaviour. Nonetheless, reverting it is sensible to give us
the time we need to investigate more.
If the reference from cancel CAP XML we received via API does not
match with any existing broadcast, return 404.
Do the same if service id doesn't match.
Also refactor code to cancel broadcast out into separate function
It should be a separate function that is only called by create_broadcast
function. This will prevent create_broadcast from becoming too
big and complex and doing too many things.
1. The number of letters that we send to DVLA will be not be correct (see 20ead82463/app/celery/letters_pdf_tasks.py (L136))
This may raise an alert with DVLA when they find we have sent them fewer letter than we have reported.
2. When we get the PDF from S3 we will get a file not found 20ead82463/app/celery/letters_pdf_tasks.py (L244)
The error will not prevent the collate task from completing but we will see an alert email for the exception and raise questions.
Although this situation is very unlikely because we have a 15 minute window between the last letter deadline date and the time we kick off the collate task we should still mitigate these issues. I updated the queries to only return letters with billable_units > 0, all valid letters should have at least 1 billable unit.
It is possible that the personalisation for a templated letter can make the letter exceed 10 pages or 5 sheets. We are not validating the letters posted via the API for this validation error. It is only possible to validate the letter once we create the PDF in notifications-template-preview. This means that the letter can only get a validation-failed status after the client has received a 201 from the POST to /v2/notifications.
NOTE: we only validate the preview row of a CSV for this validation error, this change will mean that it is possible for a letter to be marked as validation-failed after a successful file upload.
A new task to update the notification to `validation-failed` has been added to the API. If we find that the letter is too long once we have created the PDF we call the `update-validation-failed-for-templated-letter` task rather than `update-billable-units-for-letter` task.
New work flow for a letter in brief:
API - receives POST /v2/notifications
:: save to db
:: put CREATE_LETTERS_PDF task on queue for template preview to consume
TEMPLATE-PREVIEW - consumes task CREATE_LETTERS_PDF
:: create PDF
:: count pages of PDF
:: IF page count exceeds 10 pages
put in the letters-invalid-pdf S3 bucket with metadata (similar to the precompiled letters)
put `update-validation-failed-for-templated-letter` task on the queue for the API to consume
ELSE
put PDF in the `letters-pdf` bucket
put `update-billable-units-for-letter` task on the queue
API - consumes `update-billable-units-for-letter` OR `update-validation-failed-for-templated-letter` task
:: IF `update-billable-units-for-letter` task:
update billable units for notification as usual
:: ELSE `update-validation-failed-for-templated-letter`:
update notification_status = `validation-failed`
ADMIN - view notification page for letter
:: show validation letter for templated letter
There will be 3 PRs in order to make this change, one for the API, template-preview and the admin app.
Deployment plan
Deploy Admin first
Deploy API
Deploy template-preview
Related PRs:
alphagov/notifications-template-preview#619alphagov/notifications-admin#4107https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/169209742
This field caused some confusion and lots of unnecessary work
to our colleague because of unclear name.
The field was named sms_fragments, where in fact the value of
the field is: those sms fragments that go above free allowance
multiplied by the rate multiplier.
The new name was chosen through consultation with colleagues
who use billing report the most.
This follows a similar approach as [1]. Recently we've seen lots
of errors from this task, which we think are a consequence of it
doing too much work and tripping Celery's visibility timeout.
While we can optimise the query [2], it's likely the errors will
return as the number of live services grows. Parallelising the
aggregation now will make it more futureproof.
[1]: https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/3397
[2]: https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/3417
This is similar to the corresponding endpoint for services. However,
it is a little simpler since we don't need to worry about always having
at least one team member for an organisation.
The new dao function added, `dao_remove_user_from_organisation`, is also
simpler than `dao_remove_user_from_service` since we don't have any
organisation permissions to deal with.
Investigation with EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE for the notification
history table shows this is another instance of [1] but for the key
type column. Swapping "!=" for "IN" solves the problem.
[1]: https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/3360
If a service has not sent any SMS for the financial year the free allowance was showing up as 0 rather than the number in annual billing. The query has been updated to use an outer join so that the free allow will be returned when there is no ft_billing.
There is a potential performance enhancement to only return the data for the services of the organisation in the `fetch_sms_free_allowance_remainder_until_date` subquery. I will investigate in a subsequent PR.
We want admin to send a POST request to this route if the data contains
a message recipient (a phone number or email address) so that this does
not show in the logs. This changes the route to accept both GET and POST
requests.
When running the night reporting tasks we are seeing that some tasks are failing because the query is timing out. We need to revisit how to optimise the query but this will at least let the process finish.
At the moment, when we are processing and sending an SMS we open
a DB connection at the start of the celery task and then close it
at the end of the celery task. Nice and simple.
However, during that celery task we make an HTTP call out to our
SMS providers. If our SMS providers have problems or response times
start to slow then it means we have an open DB connection sat waiting
for our SMS providers to respond which could take seconds. If our
SMS providers grind to a halt, this would cause all of the
celery tasks to hold on to their connections and we would run out
of DB connections and Notify would fall over.
We think we can solve this by closing the DB session which releases
the DB connection back to the pool.
Note, we've seen this happen in staging during load testing if our
SMS provider stub has fallen over. We've never seen it in production
and it may be less unlikely to happen as we are balancing traffic
across two providers and they generally have very good uptime.
One downside to be aware of is there could be a slight increase in
time spent to send an SMS as we will now spend a bit of extra time
closing the DB session and then reopening it again after the HTTP
request is done.
Note, there is no reason this approach couldn't be copied for our
email provider too if it appears successful.
We can't control who might be sending messages on inbound numbers
that we own i.e. this log isn't an actionable error. Looks like it
used to represent something that _was_ an error [1], but that's not
the case anymore, so it seems reasonable to downgrade it.
[1]: d99ab329eb (diff-80d123d9abb40f80a221979940657a2751cc7cb33f255aa8f352a8324023e022L125)
If the S3 object is missing [1], then that's what we want, so we
don't need such a severe log for it, but we still want to know as
it's not expected. This is separate to more general "ClientError"
exceptions, which could mean anything.
There weren't any tests to cover missing S3 objects, so I've added
one. I don't think we need a test for ClientErrors:
- If there was no handler, the task would fail and we'd learn about
it that way.
- The scope of the calling task is now much smaller, so it matters
less than it used to [2].
[1]: 81a79e56ce/app/letters/utils.py (L52)
[2]: f965322f25