Discovery: FE Alerts and analytic event triggers when PDF downloads fail

[wesrowe]

Description

In #10042, Daniel's investigation into GA events cast doubt on the validity of our GA (Google Analytics) events.

Background on GA: The GA event Wes is using to identify PDF download issues tracks an Alert in the ui. GA event: Navigation - Alert Box - Link Click - error - This form link isn’t working - (not set) - email the forms managers. Over time, spikes in this signal correspond anecdotally to VBA Forms Managers receiving emails from Veterans that a PDF download failed. We suspect that the Alert provides a way to email Forms managers, but need to verify.

GA provides the Form Detail pages where this event fired, and about 1/3 of them were from the subdomain www.va.gov, which he verified is an S3 bucket where such failures are extremely improbable.

Questions to investigate on the FE:

On Forms Detail pages:

• What does the UI Alert tracked by the GA event above actually look like?
• Does the Alert UI provide an "email someone" link/button that might be generating the emails to Forms Managers at VBA?
  • If so, how is the email address populated? (Hard-code, API payload, ...)
• How is the Alert triggered? Is that trigger reliable? (i.e., is it possible Vets are getting a false-positive that PDF is not available when it really is?)
• Does the GA event seem to be a reliable indicator that the Alert was displayed? Anything sketchy about the trigger?

On the Find-a-form page (ie, list view), which also offers PDF Download links:

• Is there error handling code there? What does it trigger a UI change?
• Do you see evidence of GA events being triggered on download failure? (and what is it)
• Are the answers to the above questions about detail pages different for this search page?

API Calls to investigate:

• Ask Steve: how does FE talk to Lighthouse? Passthru thru platform, just to get API keys added to headers?
• The spike in failures on 8/8/22, documented in #10096, was caused by a Forms API call that seemed to happen when the user clicks the Download link – which seems like weird timing for an API call.
  • Is the Forms API really getting called when a user clicks the download link? (And at which step?)

Monitoring setup: Are key interactions being logged to sentry on failure? on success?

• Form Search page
  • Forms API call (failure displays a red Alert component)
  • PDF download click
• Form Detail page
  • PDF download click
  • API failure on form download (we know failure is tracked in Sentry)

Acceptance Criteria

• [x] Add screenshots to the Mural where we're tracking forms stuff
• [ ] Answer the questions carefully in this ticket
• [ ] Make recommendations for improving monitoring for real-time alerts via Sentry
• [ ] Make recommendations for FE code/API-call changes to reduce Veteran-facing issues (e.g., removing extraneous API calls)

CMS Team

Please check the team(s) that will do this work.

• [ ] Program
• [ ] Platform CMS Team
• [ ] Sitewide Crew
• [ ] ⭐️ Sitewide CMS
• [x] ⭐️ Public Websites
• [ ] ⭐️ Facilities
• [ ] ⭐️ User support

[dsasser]

Follow up tickets created for this discovery work:

10235

10236

10237

10239

[dsasser]

Mural link with discovery findings: https://app.mural.co/t/vagov6717/m/vagov6717/1660150431569/27c80eaeeaedfd88c80322ae177b68c503345ba9?sender=u2cc9d7c4c6c0dea143b21411

Image for those unable to access Mural:

[jilladams]

@dsasser 2 follow up items on this:

1. The modal has a fallback mode that points veterans to email Forms managers when it fails. Can you add that?
2. The modal shows once per N (we think 24h) - can you add that too, or a guess about it?