On this page:
At a glance
2018 - 2023
2+ years
Ongoing
GovCMS, Drupal, Single Digital Presence, LAGOON
Federal government
Support & optimisation
GovTech, Whole of government, Open source, Web development, Open platform, Content management systems
Multidisciplinary teams, Tools & systems, Security, Open standards & common platforms, Open source
Overview
Governments’ challenge
Many of our government clients require 24/7 support for urgent issues. This was particularly essential during the pandemic, when hundreds of thousands more citizens were relying on government websites more often.
Governments’ transformation
Salsa’s 24/7 application support services helped many of our government clients respond to large traffic events, security alerts, search issues and other urgent requirements. Three example clients are , Victoria’s Single Digital (SDP) and Victoria’s Department of .
The outcomes
Access to a Salsa Drupal expert 24/7 to ensure any urgent issues are fixed ASAP
Peace of mind, knowing urgent issues will be addressed and resolved quickly any time of the day or night
Ability to easily keep track of emergency support through process documentation and reporting
Full case study
Below is more information on the challenge, transformation and outcomes.
Governments’ challenge — dealing with urgent web issues
Many of our government clients require 24/7 support for urgent issues. This was particularly essential during the pandemic, when hundreds of thousands more citizens were relying on government websites more often. The range of issues vary, but include things like:
- High traffic alerts
- Assistance with urgent content updates
- Search issues (e.g. the search needs to be re-indexed)
- Security alerts
- Urgent cache purges
- Infrastructure platform issues
If government websites don’t have 24/7 support, it can result in a critical failure to provide content or services to citizens in a timely manner.
Governments’ transformation — 24/7 support
Salsa’s after-hours and emergency application support provides 24/7 coverage to several government agencies/jurisdictions, including the Department of Finance ( ), the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s (DPC) and the Victorian Department of Health. Through the service, Salsa’s Drupal and platform infrastructure experts are on-call 24/7.
services 330+ government sites, including very high profile sites like Services , and . Similarly, the SDP services many sites, with high-profile sites including , , and . Victoria’s came onto Salsa’s support service, including 24/7 support, in 2021. It represents another important suite of websites, including the high-profile health.vic.gov.au site that Salsa helped onboard to the SDP platform during a pandemic.
The emergency support is coordinated using a system called , which includes a roster of who’s on call. When a client calls the dedicated emergency support phone number, Opsgenie connects the call to the on-call engineer. If the engineer fails to answer, the call is escalated to other team members and then management until the call is connected. Simultaneously, an incident is raised in Opsgenie. This incident log also acts as a record of the call. Service-level agreements (SLAs) with our clients set out our response times.
When an emergency call comes in, we triage the ticket, investigating the issue. If possible, we act on the requirement for a fast resolution. However, in some cases we may need others to perform an action. For example, it might be something that only the platform owners can do (e.g. GovCMS or SDP) or we might need to direct the issue to the application vendor (in the case of SDP). In some cases, one of our platform partners ( and ) might need to get involved. Our role in these situations is as the ‘first responder’ and to coordinate emergency action from the organisation that can fix the problem (if we can’t).
Some examples of the types of urgent issues we’ve been responding to for these clients in the past 12 months include:
High traffic incidents (across all three clients) related to the pandemic
Database restorations
Integration issues between connected services and Drupal websites
Investigation into memory consumption and request blocking resulting in application outage
CDN cache clear
Investigation into SDP edge configuration issues resulting in intermittent downtime
SSL certificate issues
Automated tasks not triggering correctly and resulting in missing data
The outcomes — full support coverage
Access to a Salsa Drupal expert 24/7 to ensure any urgent issues are fixed ASAP
Peace of mind, knowing urgent issues will be addressed and resolved quickly
Ability to easily keep track of emergency support through process documentation and reporting
About the agencies
GovCMS: The Department of (Finance) owns the GovCMS , a whole-of-government digital platform for use across all levels of government in Australia.
SDP: Victoria’s Single Digital is the whole-of-government digital platform run by Victoria's Department of Premier and (DPC).
DH: Victoria’s Department of focuses on policies and services for Victorians’ health and wellbeing. It’s also the lead agency in Victoria’s COVID-19 response.