Benefits Gateway Service

BGS

Benefits Gateway Services. Provides a wide variety of services about veterans, benefits and awards. BGS offers APIs to read and write data to Corporate Database (CorpDB)

Integration Endpoints

The best way to integrate with BGS is through the bgs-ext gem.

Additional Notes

Domain: INT (there are two servers in the INT domain) and the day of the month. It will provides an audit log of method calls and it's average response time. Can search for APPL: CASEFLOW

BGS has 5 domains. This seems to be their way of load balancing as clients are assigned to a specific domain. - Internal (VBAIntDomain) Caseflow uses this one - External (VBAExtDomain) - Vbs (VBAVbsDomain) - CRM (VBACrmDomain) - Batch (VBABatchDomain) Caseflow is on the Internal domain. When Caseflow establishs a claim via VBMS, VBMS goes through the External domain. This will change once Caseflow starts passing the user id, then it will use the internal domain. VBMS uses both the Internal and External (not sure when it uses one or the other) They deploy about once a month as part of the Coordinated Installs. BGS is made up of two dev teams They do not physically perform the deployments to the weblogic servers that is handled by another team (weblogic admins).

Required Configuration

bgs-ext is a gem that helps developers granted to be external consumers of the BGS (Benefits Gateway Services) service connect to a set of VA internal benefits related webservices. The gem is integrated into vets-api via the Gemfile and BGS initializer.

Overview and Terminology

See:

• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team-sensitive/blob/master/VA-Systems/BGS/PaymentInformationServiceInputOutput.doc

• https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team-sensitive/blob/master/VA-Systems/BGS/BGS%20Security%20Framework%20Users%20Guide.pdf

Known External Dependencies

• MVI. MVI is used first to look up the Veteran.

• Tuxedo sits in front of all services, but is not under BGS team control - separate team.

• CorpDB

Outage Status and Maintenance Windows

• Deploys occur once monthly, on a strict cadence

  • 2nd weekend of every month

  • Only a small window after deploy to fix issues

  • Services are brought down for the weekend for a deploy/maintenance window

  • A strong business need is required to deploy off-cadence

Submitting a Service Request

A service request is required to bugs and new feature requests.

1. Open https://YourIT.va.gov/va (Chrome recommended).

2. Click Make a Request to open the Service Catalog.

3. Choose the Web/API Requests item in the catalog's Categories section.

4. Click the Enterprise Services Collaboration Portal card to open ESCP in a new tab. NOTE: If on a mac, you will get a login pop up, cancelling out of it usually works

5. Click Project Catalog

6. In Keyword Search, search for "Caseflow"

7. In the Caseflow search result tile, Click Details

8. Scroll to bottom of page and Click Create New Service Request

9. Fill out the form and Submit

   • For the funding questions select "Yes"

   • Do not need to enter in a strip number

   • Need to fill in Requested UAT Testing, Requested Pre-Production, and Requested Production. The other dates can be left blank.

Service Level Agreement

Escalation Procedure

Contacts

see: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team-sensitive/blob/master/products/dependency-claims/incident-response.md#roles-and-responsibilities

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