Appeals/Caseflow

Overview and Terminology

Appeals status data is presented to VA.gov users alongside disability claims data.

• Va.gov sends a query for a user's appeals data to Caseflow via a REST API.

• Caseflow in turn queries the VACOLS database for the appeals data.

• Caseflow also queries BGS (which is an interface to the "VA corporate database") for SSN information.

Integration Endpoints

Note: You must have access to the internal VA network to access all the links in the table below

Required Configuration

appeals_status:
  mock: "{{ plat_config.APPEALS_MOCK }}"
  app_token: "{{ lookup('aws_ssm_custom', '/dsva-vagov/vets-api/<env>/appeals_api_token') }}"
  host: "{{ plat_config.APPEALS_HOST }}"

Key Contacts

Caseflow is built and maintained by the Appeals DSVA team.

For implementation questions members of that team tend to be present in the shared #appeals-status Slack channel.

For operations issues, use the #appeals-devops channel.

On the VA.gov side the Appeals status application is implemented and maintained by the Benefits & Memorials team.

Incident Response

1. Check that the forward proxy has at least one connection to the Caseflow servers by running the following query in the Datadog Metrics Explorer and validate there are more than 0 backends up
   sum(haproxy_backend_status{proxy="appeals_back"})

2. Check that the forward proxy health check is returning a valid result
   curl https://internal-dsva-vagov-dev-fwdproxy-1893365470.us-gov-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com:4437/health-check

3. Check that the Caseflow service is available and that the health check succeeds from within the VA network
   nc -z appeals.cf.ds.va.gov 443
curl https://appeals.cf.ds.va.gov:443/health-check

4. Check the VACOLS status endpoint: https://monitor.cf.ds.va.gov. (You must have access to the internal VA network to access this link.)

5. Notify the #appeals-devops and/or #oncall Slack channels with any findings.

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