Pingdom Bouncer canary check

Bouncer has a canary route at https://www.direct.gov.uk/__canary__ which queries all the database tables which Bouncer uses to serve all responses to users and checks that those tables are not empty. The canary should return 200; if it doesn’t then errors will be being served to users - see the table below for more details of the errors in each case.

Possible causes of errors on the canary route include:

• DNS problems for www.direct.gov.uk or bouncer.publishing.service.gov.uk - check Bouncer’s Nginx logs via the logit.io dashboard to see which requests are getting through
• CDN problems resulting in requests for www.direct.gov.uk not being correctly passed to https://bouncer.publishing.service.gov.uk
• bouncer-* or transition-postgresql-slave-1 machines being unavailable
• Bouncer’s dependencies being missing or having errors in its configuration
• memory leaks in Bouncer
• the app being unable to connect or authorise to the database
• the database or the required tables being missing or empty
• the bouncer role not having SELECT privileges on the required tables

The database tables checked by the canary route (in order) and the effect on requests for transitioned sites of errors when querying them:

There are other tables in the transition_production database but they are only used by Transition and not by Bouncer.