Historically we have had the failmail system setup so when a payment processor does something we don't expect (returns a status we hadn't seen before, is down, etc) it will send a failmail alerting us that something unexpected has happened.
With gravy inbetween us and the payment processor, gravy will now be getting the unexpected responses which gravy normalizes to a failure response and we handle accordingly. So far there have been two incidents with paypal donations where something was not working right but we had no failmail visibility as the gravy response was something we could handle.
Incidents so far:
- T387289: Gravy PayPal recurring charge failures (INVALID_PARAMETER_SYNTAX)
- T401428: dLocal missing tax ID + status mismatch errors
- T402040: Gravy 'unexpected_state' payment failures
How do we want to try and find these issues going forward?
Suggestions so far:
- Someone in Donor Relations/fr-tech keeping an eye on the gravy console for any error wave (I think we should have something more automated set up than this but its what we should be doing in the meantime)
- fr-tech builds something that further looks into the responses gravy sends back and create failmail if its not something we are expecting
- We build more analytic dashboards to keep an eye on overall metrics