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I need to integrate with service A. There is an issue.

Me: Service A, we have an issue. We don't get any errors but the final entity doesn't get created
ServiceA: Ahh, I see. Since you didn't get any errors, try escalating this to Service B - we are using it and they might see what's wrong.
Ticket: *closed*

Me: Service B, we have an issue and ServiceA says I should talk to you.
ServiceB: Ahh, I see. I don't see any errors in our logs. Try escalating this to Service C
Ticket: *closed*

Me: Service C, we have an issue and Service B says I should talk to you.
ServiceC: How do you send the request to us?
Me: I don't. Service B does.
ServiceC: I see. I don't see any requests coming from them. Talk to Service B
Ticket: *closed*

Me: Service B, Service C says you don't send a request. Please have a look.
<...>

Each ticket takes 2-3 days to be noticed.

My fuse tripped there and I addressed this ping-pong situation in the mail thread with mgmt in it. ServiceA hid behind the "it's not our service, we only provide self-service tools" wall. So, again, I'm left out there to dance this corporate polka...

Comments
  • 0
    Haha reminds me of The Unicorn/Phonix Project
  • 2
    This is every day of my life. Services hell.
  • 0
    is this considered an acceptable response?

    "We recognize that our service behaves differently from the specification, but we use an underlying service and we have no evidence (yet, because we didn't look, lol) that it's not their fault so just take whatever circumstantial details about our code you can squeeze out of our public API and go talk to them."
  • 0
    Like, my instinctive response would be that I'm not so sure that this is my job, but I'm happy to do it if they give me unrestricted access to all of their code, logs (dev and prod), issue tracker and internal communications, which are normally needed to identify everything that's known about the issue and raise an actionable ticket with B
  • 2
    Well... try being the log service. The log service logged the error, so the log service gets the ticket.
  • 1
    @2Fdev2Ftcsh I would. Happily. I'd love to create a single ticket for myself and have it lurking around until the problem is resolved. But each of the dependencies doesn't move a finger until I create a separate ticket for them. And when they do - they close the ticket immediately.

    And tickets are not reassignable to other teams.
  • 4
    Isn't it the job of service A to talk to service B in this instance instead of you. As they are theoretically responsible for the implementation.
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