EMIS

Enterprise Military Information Service (eMIS)

Overview and terminology

eMIS provides information about veterans' military service history. The main way in which it is used by va.gov is to answer the question "Is this user a veteran?"

• eMIS in turn integrates with an additional backend system VADIR VA/DoD Identity Repository

• VIERS Military History Service

eMIS provides a SOAP API available over HTTPS.

Integration endpoints

Required configuration

emis:
  host: "{{ plat_config.EMIS_HOST }}"

SSL client certificate

eMIS requires an approved client SSL certificate in order to connect. This is configured on the forward proxy, note you will need to obtain the client certificate and key to do any connection debugging.

Replacing expiring client certs

1. Create new client certificates issued by the VA by following instructions here. (Some users may be unable to view these instructions, depending on their permissions.) Use the same CN names that are used in the current client certificates as that seems to be tied to how they record and approve client certs.

2. Create a Service Now ticket and assign to the VIERS eMIS Tier 2 Support assignment group, wait for a response and follow the directions given.¹

¹ If this, for whatever reason isn't working out, you can try and contact one of these VIERS engineers, Scott.Harris2@va.gov or Nigel.Sollars@va.gov about updating approved client certificates for eMIS. They will ask for a copy of the certificates and corresponding environments. (These engineers were found through contact with Jim.Jones@va.gov through David.Gray@va.gov)

Escalation procedure

1. Check that the forward proxy has at least one connection to the eMIS servers. Run the following query on prometheus and validate there are more then 0 backends up
   sum(haproxy_backend_status{proxy="emis_back"})

2. Check that the forward proxy health check is returning a valid result
   curl https://internal-dsva-vetsgov-prod-forward-proxy-650477441.us-gov-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com:4438/VIERSService/eMIS/v1/MilitaryInformationService?wsdl

3. Check that the eMIS service is available from within the VA network
   nc -z vaausvrsweb20.aac.va.gov 443
   

4. You can check whether the health check (WSDL endpoint) returns a valid result, but you will need to obtain the client certificate and private key. curl -v -k --cert ./vetsgov-emis-prod-cert.pem --key ./vetsgov-emis-prod-key.pem "https://vrsweb20.aac.va.gov/VIERSService/eMIS/v1/MilitaryInformationService?wsdl"

5. Notify the eMIS team. The group is known as VIERS eMIS Tier 2 Support to the VA Enterprise Service Desk 855-673-4357 For pre-production issues the team requested (as of 8/7/2020) to be contacted via email to POCs: Scott Harris & Nigel Sollars

Key contacts

Help and feedback

• Get help from the Platform

• Create an issue ticket to suggest changes to this page

• Submit a feature request