We wrote to the queue as a performance optimisation , however dev found it confusing to not have immediate access to the notification as it may be perished some minutes later under periods of load. Additionally we had a couple of DB issues which led to us dropping notifications.
Pushing the DB write to earlier in the flow makes the system a little more robust in the early days, we may want to change this when the traffic increases.
Logic:
- live services don't check days limit for now
- restricted services check limits
(caveat) simulate keys aren't checking day limit even in restricted mode.
When you use a simulate API key it should behave like a live service,
except for actually sending the messages. There should be no limits even
if the service is in trial mode.
This commit removes the restriction on sending messages when you’ve sent
up to your daily limit.
When you use a simulate API key it should behave like a live service,
except for actually sending the messages. There should be no limits even
if the service is in trial mode.
This commit removes the restriction on sending messages to peole outside
your team when you’re in trial mode.
Previously there were 4 queues for sending messages
The was based on the fact that each notification has 2 actions - persist in the database and send to provider.
Two queues supported the CSV upload - for the first of these tasks
- bulk-email
- build-sms
And there were two more queues for the tasks that make the 3rd party client calls.
- sms
- email
API Calls just used the latter two queues for both tasks
Added four new queues
- db-email
- db-sms
- send-sms
- send-email
So an API call puts a notification into the db-[type] queue first, which then puts the notification into the send-[type] queue
Build queues stay as before.
This will allow us to target processing of these tasks with separate workers to manage these differently.
- As before this is now driven from the notifications history table
- Removed from updates and create
- Signatures changes to removed unused params hits many files
- Also potential issue around rate limiting - we used to get the number sent per day from the stats table - which was a single row lookup, now we have to count this. This applies to EVERY API CALL. Probably not a good thing and should be addressed urgently.
Although using a team key is functionally the same as your service being
restricted, conflating the two errors is not helpful. What we typically
saw in research was that someone was using a team key, got the error,
used a live key and got the _same_ error.
This commit adds a new error message that specifically mentions the type
of API key that you’re using.
Scenario we saw in research:
- trying to send a message to someone outside your team
- service is in trial mode
Result:
- error message was terrible, no-one understood it
Solution:
- better error message
Removed all existing statsd logging and replaced with:
- statsd decorator. Infers the stat name from the decorated function call. Delegates statsd call to statsd client. Calls incr and timing for each decorated method. This is applied to all tasks and all dao methods that touch the notifications/notification_history tables
- statsd client changed to prefix all stats with "notification.api."
- Relies on https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/61 for request logging. Once integrated we pass the statsd client to the logger, allowing us to statsd all API calls. This passes in the start time and the method to be called (NOT the url) onto the global flask object. We then construct statsd counters and timers in the following way
notifications.api.POST.notifications.send_notification.200
This should allow us to aggregate to the level of
- API or ADMIN
- POST or GET etc
- modules
- methods
- status codes
Finally we count the callbacks received from 3rd parties to mapped status.
We had a test like this for sending sms, but not email. This meant that,
for example, we weren’t checking that the provider was getting passed
the HTML and plain text versions of the email.
