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heartbeat.md

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Heartbeat

A service developed by the HMPPS Integration API team. The service is intended to be a standalone container capable of making requests which mimic consumers using HMPPS Integration API.

Heartbeat performs a configurable simple request against the API (see Setup). Heartbeat performs the request and makes an assertion on the response. If the response contains the assertion, a success is reported to CircleCI.

⚠️ The current implementation of Heartbeat expects the response to contain a firstName property; Without this, Heartbeat will result in a fail.

It is recommended that corresponding logs within Sentry are checked in the instance of a failed Heartbeat. These are likely to reveal what went wrong server side.

Intervals

Heartbeat will run on a scheduled interval. This is an ongoing health check to ensure that the HMPPS Integration API has no downtime. In the event of a failure, team members are notified.

Deployment

During the deployment pipeline, Heartbeat runs before the next environment can be deployed. For instance, pre-prod cannot be deployed if Heartbeat had reported failure on dev. This provides a safety net to prevent critical errors from propagating to our production environment.

Setup

Heartbeat is already configured in each of the environments. But the steps below can be followed to set up Heartbeat in a new environment.

  1. Ensure /scripts/heartbeat.sh exists in the hmpps-integration-api repository.
  2. Create a new API key (if one does not already exist in the cloud platform namespace). This PR can be used as a template.
  3. Generate client certificates for Heartbeat using the /scripts/generate-client-certificate.sh script.
  4. Create a new context in CircleCI. The name should be hmpps-integration-api-heartbeat-<environment>
  5. Add the following environment variables:
    • API_KEY - The consumer API key
    • MTLS_CERT - Base64 encoded client .PEM file
    • MTLS_KEY - Base64 encoded client .KEY file
    • SERVICE_URL - The HMPPS Integration API URL to request
  6. Configure a new job within /.circleci/config.yml to run Heartbeat when desired. Existing examples of the interval and deployment jobs can be found in the config. Ensure the context passed into the job matches the context created in CircleCI.

Steps

Job runs can be viewed from the CircleCI dashboard.