Zero Silent Failures
Last updated: March 10, 2025
As part of digitizing a form, several steps are required to ensure submissions have zero silent failures. These should be considered throughout the entire process and are outlined in detail throughout this guide.
A silent failure occurs when a VA system accepts a Veteran's form, evidence, or other submission on http://VA.gov or the mobile app — but that submission fails during handoff to a downstream system, and the user is never notified.
Key implementation requirements:
Implement the confirmation page to keep users informed of their submission status via My VA
Add email notifications for all submission statuses received back from the API
Poll the API to receive form statuses and monitor in Datadog
Goals for zero silent failures can be found in the Readme.
Keeping Users Informed of Submission Status
Follow the VA Design System guidelines to keep users informed, including:
Email notifications for submissions in progress, received, and action needed
Displaying form submission status on My VA cards in the user's VA profile
Recording and displaying submission status on the confirmation page — see guidelines
Monitoring Silent Failures
Identify whether your application has silent failures — how to discover
Log silent failures — how to log
Set up Endpoint Monitoring in Datadog:
Configure API polling in Datadog to track submission status — example in Datadog (Datadog access required)
Ensure your form is added to the Silent Failure tracker — Datadog (Datadog access required)
Implement Tagging Standards in Datadog
Set up an on-call rotation to manage silent errors in Slack
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.