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Application: email-alert-monitoring

Script run by Jenkins that verifies GOV.UK email alerts have been sent

GitHub
email-alert-monitoring
Ownership
#tech-content-interactions-on-platform-govuk
Hosting
AWS (EKS)
Category
Utilities
Links

README

GOV.UK provides email alerts. This repo provides scripts that verify that emails have been sent for certain publications.

Currently the script looks at drug and medical advice alerts and foreign travel advice alerts.

We validate each email has been sent by Notify (gov.uk.email@notifications.service.gov.uk) and received by our own govuk_email_check@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk email box.

Medical safety alerts

An email address has been subscribed to these alerts (via the email signup page).

Every hour, we look at the public RSS feed for alerts. We then check the email address has received an email for these publications via the Google Gmail API.

Travel advice alerts

An email address has been subscribed to these alerts (via the email signup page).

Every hour, we look at the content store feed for alerts. We then check the email address has received an email for these publications via the Google Gmail API.

Technical documentation

Running

bundle exec rake run_medical_alerts for the medical safety alert checker

bundle exec rake run_travel_alerts for the travel advice alert checker

Both rake tasks will exit normally and not output anything if everything is OK.

If they find that some alerts have not been sent out, they will print the missing alerts and exit with a non-zero exit code. When reported to Icinga by Jenkins, this will alert developers.

Running the test suite

bundle exec rspec

Testing the alert checks

  1. Let 2nd line know that you’re testing changes to these alerts.
  2. In the inbox (govuk_email_check@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk) for whichever alert type you’re checking, delete an email that was received during the inspection period. For Medical Safety alerts this is the the 5 most recent over an hour old (see here) and for Travel Advice this is all updates between 150 minutes to 2 days old (see here). The credentials for the email account are in the 2nd line pass store - pass/2ndline/google-accounts/govuk_email_check@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.
  3. In production Jenkins, either run the MedicalSafetyEmailAlertCheck or TravelAdviceEmailAlertCheck. This should fail and output an error message reporting the absence of the deleted email.
  4. Check the alert is triggered correctly in Icinga.
  5. If testing the Travel advice check we would expect PagerDuty to notify whoevers on call (in hours this would be the devs on 2nd line).
  6. Back in the inbox, restore the email from trash.
  7. Rerun the Jenkins job you ran in step 3.
  8. Everything should be green.

Regenerating Google OAuth credentials

The GOOGLE_OAUTH_CREDENTIALS environment variable contains a JSON representation of the OAuth credentials used to connect to the email account to check for email alerts.

If these credentials stop working (for example, they are revoked), they can be regenerated using the following steps:

  1. Log in to the Google account that will be checked for email alerts. For best results, do this in a private browsing window.
  2. Run bundle exec rake get_oauth_url to get a Google authorisation URL.
  3. Visit this URL in the browser window from step 1.
  4. Allow permission for this app to log into the relevant email account.
  5. The browser will redirect to a non-existent localhost URL - copy the contents of the code query string parameter from this URL.
  6. Run bundle exec rake get_oauth_token[<code>], where <code> is the code you extracted in step 5.
  7. Copy the output of the command and replace the existing credentials in aws production hierdata.

Licence

MIT License