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Operational Processes

Hours of support

Our hours of providing support are 9am - 4pm. During this time we will work on support requests from teams and make sure someone is available to answer questions in Slack channel #ask-modernisation-platform.

Outside of these hours we will respond to high priority incidents as per our on call process.

During support hours (9AM - 4PM)

At least one engineer to:

The whole support team to:

  • Manage incident process for incidents in progress
  • Work on user requests for larger work
  • Work on support backlog stories

Before ending the day (4PM)

At least one engineer to:

  • Handover information about any planned work or in progress high priority incidents to on call engineer

#ask-modernisation-platform slack channel

The #ask-modernisation-platform channel is our main entry point for support. The main purpose of the channel is to discuss the problems that people are having and help them to solve them.

We encourage people to ask questions and report problems in this channel and we’ll do the best we can to help. We also welcome comments, opinions and any feedback regarding any of the services and the platform as a whole. This channel can also be used to communicate to other Modernisation Platform users on topics you think that might be useful for other users.

One of the Modernisation Platform team will be available to answer questions throughout the hours of support (9AM - 4PM).

#modernisation-platform-update slack channel

#modernisation-platform-update is a low-volume channel for broadcast communications.

Examples include:

  • To announce future scheduled work (e.g. “we will be upgrading our AMI builder on … no downtime is expected”)
  • When there is planned work on a service (e.g. “we are doing some maintenance work on an RDS instance in prod”)
  • When there is an incident in progress (e.g “there is a problem with Github Actions, no one can access it right now”)

In these situations:

  • Try not to use notifiers like @here and @channel unless absolutely necessary
  • Perhaps use visual clues in your message to show it is an announcement
  • Commit to a time when you will update on the situation and keep that commitment

So for example:

ANNOUNCEMENT: As agreed with the relevant teams, the Modernisation Platform team will be upgrading the AWS Terraform provider to version 4 on the example service today.

We will be doing this work between 10AM and 11AM

Posts in this channel should also be forwarded to #ask-modernisation-platform

Our on call process

Team members who are on call manage an on call rota in PagerDuty. The on call rota consists of a primary engineer and a secondary engineer. The primary engineer is the first point of contact. The Modernisation Platform is complex so we have a secondary engineer on call. Their role is to provide support to the primary if this is required. Team members that are new to the rota should ensure that they have a secondary who has enough knowledge and experience of the process to support them.

The on-call hours are 7AM–9AM and 4PM–10PM weekdays, 7AM-10PM weekends and bank holidays.

On call team members will respond to high priority incidents during on call hours and will work on those incidents. If the engineer is not able to resolve the issue they will:

  • Inform the affected team
  • Put together a plan to resolve the issue during normal working hours

Critical incidents only - contact the out-of-hours on-call person

In the event of a ‘Critical incident’ to the Modernisation Platform infrastructure affecting applications (out of support hours), please email contact-on-call-modernisation-platform@digital.justice.gov.uk, stating:

  • The known facts surrounding the incident
  • Please also state the ‘Slack’ channel on which further communication can take place.

The on-call person will get back to you on ‘Slack’ as soon as possible. It must be emphasised that this is ONLY for ‘Critical Incidents’ and is not for out-of-hours application or development support.

Our documentation

All Modernisation Platform documentation is openly available in Git repositories stored on GitHub. The starting point for this documentation is the Modernisation Platform repository.

For users of the Modernisation Platform there is the Modernisation Platform User Guide. This guide is the “front door” to the Modernisation Platform and contains concepts, guides, walkthroughs and other information to help teams use the Modernisation Platform.

This page was last reviewed on 11 March 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 11 September 2024 by the page owner #modernisation-platform .
This page was set to be reviewed before 11 September 2024 by the page owner #modernisation-platform. This might mean the content is out of date.