Phase VII: Monitoring & Maintenance
Last Updated: December 11, 2024
PLEASE NOTE This guide recently transferred ownership and is now maintained by the Veteran Facing Forms team. We’re working through some revisions and encourage you to submit an issue ticket if you have feedback about how we can improve this guide!
👀 How’s the Form Doing?
The goal of this phase is to set up and build a process for analytics monitoring, with the goal of improving the form’s performance, reliability, and solidity of your form as people use it.
Your team should also build an ongoing maintenance process of the digitized form, with the goal of improving the form’s accuracy and alignment with the paper form into the future after the digitized experience has launched.
⏮️ What Your Team Should Have Completed/prepared Before Starting This Phase
🧑🍳 What Your Team Will Have by the End of This Phase
A digitized form live on VA Find a Form and turned on to 100%.
Datadog access for monitoring your form.
A Domo dashboard for your form.
Datadog set up and actively monitoring your form for errors.
A schedule for checking metrics and for errors.
A process for filing and addressing tickets for errors.
Add downtime notifications when the API is down.
⭐ Steps
Step 1: Set up Datadog for the newly launched form
Your developers requested access in the previous stage and once granted the dashboard is set up by your team’s developers.
Make sure all team members can get access to the Domo dashboard for your form or forms.
Step 2: Create maintenance schedule
Stay informed of changes on PDF by subscribing to calendars that will send you notifications when forms change (Note: You need to be logged into the VA network to subscribe to calendars).
As explained in Phase one, every three years OMB reviews and re-approves a form. Even if there may be no visible changes in the PDF, form owners generate a new PDF file after an OMB review. This regeneration often causes the metadata in the interactive fields to change. In that case, engineers must remap the digitized fields to the PDF fields. The OMB date and expiration date must also be updated on the digitized form.
Stay in touch with the form owner to handle any future updates to the PDF outside of the OMB schedule.
Add downtime notifications for scheduled maintenance with the API is down.
Step 3: Set up monitoring
Continual or regular monitoring of the form in Datadog (view example dashboard - Datadog access required) to see if any errors occur.
Implement tagging standards in Datadog.
How frequently you monitor will depend on your form (or forms), how mature the team is, and other factors.
Step 4: Send errors to a team Slack channel: #[team-name]-notifications
Create and monitor a Slack channel for notifications.
Establish an “on call rotation” process for monitoring the notifications channel.
Use your team’s local ticketing practices to log, fix, and monitor errors.
Step 5: Monitor, report, and log silent errors
Ensure that you have set up an endpoint monitoring playbook.
Step 6: Keep users informed of their submission status
Follow the guidance set out in the VA Design System for “How to help users stay informed of their submission status” .
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.