Review Problem Bills

## **Summary** The meeting primarily focused on diagnosing and resolving critical issues within the billing output service, specifically concerning a large backlog of bills stuck in a "ready to send" state and a problematic retry loop for failed batches. A key theme was the need to balance immediate fixes to clear the backlog with planning for a more sustainable long-term solution. Effective communication and clarification of the exact problems being observed by the operations team were also highlighted as necessary next steps. ## **Root Cause Analysis and Current Issues** The discussion centered on identifying why a significant number of bills were failing to be sent to UBM and why failed batches were causing system congestion. - **The Primary Suspected Cause**: The root of the immediate service outage for components like the directory watcher and "laser" services was traced back to an expired client secret, a problem that was recently rectified. This suggests a systemic issue with credential management. - **The Retry Loop Problem**: A critical flaw in the current system logic was confirmed: when an individual bill or batch fails during output, the system immediately and continuously retries it. This creates a processing loop that blocks the queue, as many failures require manual intervention and cannot be resolved automatically through retries. - **Investigation into "Blank" Bill Errors**: There is a separate but parallel investigation into why some bills appear with blank or zero values in the interface. Initial checks on one example bill showed correct data, indicating the issue might be a display bug or a misinterpretation of the data, rather than a data integrity problem at the source. ## **Backlog Composition and Prioritization Concerns** A significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to understanding the scale of the backlog and establishing rules for processing order to minimize business impact. - **Scale of the Backlog**: Estimates of the backlog varied, but consensus settled on approximately 1,000 bills in the "ready to send" queue for auto-output, with an additional number needing manual review. All items currently in this queue appear to have validation issues preventing automatic processing. - **Urgent Need for Prepay Bills**: A clear business priority was established: prepaid customer bills must be processed and sent to UBM ahead of historical or postpaid bills. There is a pressing backlog of 500-600 prepay bills for key customers that are currently delayed. - **Lack of Built-in Priority**: The existing output service operates on a simple first-in, first-out basis with no mechanism to prioritize prepay bills or deprioritize repeatedly failing items, which contributes to the current congestion. ## **Current System Status and Operational Impact** The team assessed the real-time state of the output service to determine immediate next actions. - **Output Service Currently Idle**: Following the credential fix, the output service has cleared its previous massive internal queue and is now in a state where it is not processing anything. This is because all bills currently marked "ready to send" are flagged with errors. - **Implication for Manual Efforts**: This status means that any bill needing correction requires a manual update by the operations team before it can be successfully processed by the automated system. The system will not proceed until these validation issues are resolved. - **Communication Gap on Symptoms**: There is confusion regarding the exact symptoms the operations team (Afton and Rachel) are experiencing. Reports of continuous reprocessing and missing error logs need to be clarified to confirm if they are seeing the retry loop issue or a different problem entirely. ## **Proposed Solutions and Implementation Trade-offs** Two potential solution paths were discussed, each with different timelines and levels of effort. - **Long-term Architectural Fix (Recommended)**: The favored solution is to modify the system's logic to move failed bills or batches out of the main "ready to send" queue and into a dedicated "failed output" queue. This would immediately halt the retry loop, allow for manual investigation, and prevent failed items from blocking the processing of other valid bills. - **Short-term Mitigation**: An alternative, simpler fix would be to implement a configurable delay (e.g., 24 hours) before the system retries a failed item. While faster to implement, this is seen as less robust than the dedicated queue approach. - **The Rollback Question**: The operations team has requested a rollback of the recent output service update. However, analysis indicates the update (changing from batch to individual bill processing) did not introduce the core retry logic flaw-the flaw existed in the previous version as well. A rollback is therefore viewed as unlikely to resolve the fundamental issue and may only provide a perceived change. ## **Immediate Next Steps and Coordination** The meeting concluded with a plan to gain clarity and unblock the highest-priority bills. - **Synchronize with Operations**: The immediate next action is to connect directly with the operations lead (Afton) to precisely define the issues she is observing, prioritize the list of problems, and ensure everyone is aligned on what needs to be fixed first. - **Test Manual Processing**: Now that the output service queue is clear, the operations team should test manually pushing corrected bills, particularly prepay bills, to verify that the basic send functionality is working and that they receive timely error logs. - **Focus on Prepay Backlog**: Concurrently, efforts should be focused on manually correcting and pushing the backlog of 500-600 prepaid customer bills as the highest business priority.